NDT capability of digital shearography for different materials

In this paper, the capabilities of shearography for detecting hole and crack type defects in polymeric and metallic materials using thermal loading were investigated. In order to improve the ability of the identifying defect, the fringe multiplication technique was applied to some suspectable shearography fringe patterns. Based on the test results empirical rules for inspection plates of different material with specific thicknesses were established. For aluminium plates with thicknesses of 3 mm, minimum diameter of a surface breaking hole which is detectable is approximately equal to 2.5–3.0 times the depth of the defect, and for polymer plates with a thickness of 10 mm, the minimum detectable diameter is 0.8–1.3 times of the depth. For polymeric materials results from the increasing temperature period are approximately the same as those from the decreasing temperature period. When the orientation of the image shearing is not perpendicular to the longitudinal direction of the crack type defects, the sensitivity for defect detection is relatively higher than with perpendicular image shearing.     

Fringes demodulation in time-averaged digital shearography using genetic algorithms

This paper presents a phase recovery method, based on genetic algorithms, in time-average shearography. It is proved that a single Bessel fringe pattern obtained under a subtraction operation could be enough to calculate the phase. A merit function is solved iteratively using genetic operator like selection, reproduction and mutation. Experimental results are presented in this paper using a simple shearing system based on a Fresnel biprism.     

Direct measurement of curvature and twist of plates using digital shearography

A method of determining the second-order derivatives of displacement using digital shearing speckle interferometry is presented in this paper. A phase-shifting technique is incorporated and demonstrated to yield good quality fringe patterns that depict either the second-order derivative separately or a combination of first- and second-order derivatives. The optical set-up of this method is similar to that of conventional phase-shifting shearography, thus enjoying a simple and practical configuration. Qualitative comparison shows acceptable agreement of the generated fringe patterns with theoretical results.     

Pulsed digital holographic interferometry by using a flexible fiber endoscope

A system based on digital holographic interferometry in combination with a flexible fiber endoscope is described. A Q-switched pulsed laser is used. Two digital holograms of the test object, corresponding to the two laser pulses, are captured at separate video frames of a CCD-camera, transferred in a frame grabber and further processed in a PC. If the object undergoes a deformation during the interval between the two laser pulses (usually in the range of 5–600 μs), a fringe pattern will result from the difference between the two holograms. This fringe pattern has the information needed to evaluate quantitatively the amount of the deformation. A compact system has been developed to be used for various applications, both mechanical and biological, where measurements need to be performed at “hidden” surfaces or inside more or less closed objects. The quality of the results obtained by using mechanical objects is usually better than for biological objects. This can be explained easily by the fact that a biological surface is much more complex, in particular some parts of the surface may reflect the light well whereas some other parts may absorb it. Experimental results are presented.     

Design of adaptive spatial filter at uniform standard for automatic analysis of digital holographic microscopy

The spatial filtering method is a useful technique for the dynamic and automatic analysis in digital holographic microscopy. It has been shown that the proper selection of the spatial filter would improve the quality of the reconstructed image. However different results would be obtained by employing the spatial filter with different parameter threshold decided at different standard. This paper, according to the histogram analysis of the distribution of the +1 term spectrum of each hologram, gropes for the uniform standard for the decision of the threshold of the adaptive filter. It helps the adaptive spatial filtering method to be more advantageous for the dynamic and automatic analysis.     

Dynamic strain measurement using two wavelength-matched fiber Bragg grating sensors interrogated by a cascaded long-period fiber grating

In this work, we describe a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensing system using two wavelength-matched FBG sensors for static and dynamic strain measurement. A cascaded long-period fiber grating (CLPG)-based demodulation technique has been used to interrogate the two wavelength-matched FBG sensors. Experimental results of static strain measurement show that the proposed system has a strain resolution of 1 με. This system has also been used for dynamic strain measurement. An eddy current displacement meter-based system has been used as a comparison measurement. Experimental results of dynamic strain measurement have proved that the FBG sensing system has a good performance in the measurement of dynamic strain. The results of static and dynamic strain measurement indicate that the sensing system using two wavelength-matched FBG sensors is superior to the single FBG sensor system.     

Simultaneous strain and temperature measurement of advanced 3-D braided composite materials using an improved EFPI/FBG system

Simultaneous strain and temperature measurement for advanced 3-D braided composite materials using fibre-optic sensor technology is demonstrated, for the first time. These advanced 3-D braided composites can virtually eliminate the most serious problem of delamination for conventional composites. A tandem in-fibre Bragg-grating (FBG)/extrinsic Fabry–Perot interferometric sensor (EFPI) system with improved accuracy has been used to facilitate simultaneous temperature and strain measurement in this work. The non-symmetric distortion of the optical spectrum of the FBG, due to the combination of the FBG and the EFPI, is observed for the first time. Experimental and theoretical studies indicate that this type of distortion can affect the measurement accuracy seriously and it is mainly caused by the modulation of the periodic output of the EFPI. A simple method has been demonstrated to improve the accuracy for detection of the wavelength-shift of the FBG induced by temperature change. A strain accuracy of ±20μ and a temperature accuracy of ±1°C have been achieved, which can meet the requirements for practical applications of 3-D braided composites.