Application of correlation speckle photography for measuring contact pressures

A method for measuring contact pressures based on the measurement of irreversible changes in a surface microrelief by the speckle photography technique is presented. The analytic dependence between the change in the contrast of the carrying Young’s fringes and the relative area of change in the microrelief is considered. An example of a contact interaction between a cylinder end and a flat slab, the latter with a specially produced regular roughness on its contact surface, is used to experimentally verify the relation between the irreversible change in the roughness, the change in the contrast of the holographic interference fringes, and the change in the contrast of the carrying Young’s fringes. It is shown that the sensitivity of correlation speckle photography is higher than the sensitivity of the correlation holographic interferometry technique.