Spatio-temporal experiments of volume elastic objects with high speed digital holographic interferometry

Abstract

The optical non-destructive digital holographic interferometry (DHI) technique has proven to be a powerful tool in measuring vibration phenomena with a spatial resolution ranging from a few hundreds of nanometers to tens of micrometers. With the aid of high speed digital cameras it is possible to achieve simultaneously spatial and temporal resolution, and thus capable of measuring the entire object mechanical oscillation trajectory from one to several cycles. It is important to mention that due to faster computers with large data storage capacity there is an increasing interest in applying numerical simulation methods to mimic different real life objects for example, in the field of modern elastic materials and biological systems. The complex algorithms involved cannot render significant results mainly due to the rather large number of variables. In order to test these numerical simulations some experiments using optical techniques have been designed and reported. This is very important for example in measurements of the dynamic elastic properties of materials. In this work we present some preliminary results from experiments that use DHI to measure vibrations of an elastic spherical object subject to a mechanical excitation that induces resonant vibration modes in its volume. We report on the spatial and temporal effects that by their nature have a non-linear mechanical response. The use of a high speed CMOS camera in DHI assures the measurement of this nonlinear behavior as a sum of linear effects that happen during very short time lapses and with very small displacement amplitudes. We conclude by stating that complex numerical models may be compared to results using DHI, thus proposing an alternative method to prove and verify the mathematical models vs. real measurements on volumetric elastic objects.