A novel phase shift technique in shearography for NDT

Abstract

Digital shearography (DS) is a whole-field non-contacting optical method for nondestructive testing (NDT) of subsurface flaws and strain measurement. In this paper, we describe a novel phaseshifting technique in DS for nondestructive evaluation (NDE) and NDT of quasi dynamic behaviour of objects subject to varying loads. A Wollaston lens, a precise wave plate device and a polariser are employed to introduce constant phase differences between two shearing wavefronts. The wave plate device is in front of the polariser, which has a transmissive wavefront distortion of less than 1/8 wavelength. Phase difference can be adjusted by rotating the polariser. The rotation for angle adjusting can be easily carried out according to the requirement of the phase shifting. In this technique, the phase shifting is performed only on the static images of the object before deformation or loading. By setting the angle of the polariser to 0º, -60º and 60º, three speckle patterns with the defined phase differences are captured, and are referred to as initial speckle patterns I1,0, I1,-60 and I1,60. Afterwards, the polariser is reset to 0º before loading. The speckle pattern I0 is treated as a base pattern, and will be subtracted from the subsequent speckle patterns which are captured in the quasi dynamic deformation process.