Acoustic field imaging by light reflection at the free surface of a liquid

In this paper we present a novel technique for acoustic field imaging. This technique is based on reflection of a collimated laser beam at the free surface of a liquid. The reflected beam becomes phase modulated by the acoustic wave as in acoustical holographic systems. We do not use a reference acoustical beam for holographic reconstruction but we observe this phase modulation using dark-field techniques. It gives a measurement of the acoustic field power as a function of the position. The authors have built an optical imaging system and carried out experiments with piezocomposite transducers. The technique presented in this work is able to give fast quantitative information about the performance of individual ceramic rods of the piezocomposite.