A review of automated methods for the collection and analysis of photoelastic data

Photoelasticity is one of the most widely used full-field methods for experimental stress analysis. However, the collection of photoelastic parameters can be a long and tedious process. The advent of automated photoelastic systems has allowed the experimentalists to speed up the rate of analysis and to perform more complex investigations. This paper provides a survey of recent methods of automated photoelasticity developed in the last 20 years, i.e. methods of the fringe centres, half-fringe photoelasticity, phase-stepping photoelasticity, methods based on the Fourier transform, spectral content analysis (SCA) and RGB (red, green, blue) photoelasticity.