Speckle shearography using a multiband light source

Applications for optical metrology usually use lasers as light sources, because of the excellent spatial and temporal coherence of the emitted light. By comparison, the demands of speckle shearography concerning the coherence of the light source are low. This enables certain white-light sources to be an option.

In this paper, the feasibility of low coherence shearography is shown. For this purpose an experimental setup is designed, composed of a mercury arc lamp, a spatial filter and a Michelson interferometer. With respect to speckle shearography, important characteristics of the light source are described and the mercury arc lamp is shown to be suitable. Finally, some experimental investigations of an object under load are presented.