MEASUREMENT OF DYNAMIC CRACK-TIP DISPLACEMENT FIELD BY SPECKLE PHOTOGRAPHY AND INTERFEROMETRY

Speckle interferometry has been used to measure the transient displacement field around a crack due to stress wave loading. Double exposure interferograms are recorded with a pulsed ruby laser, and correlation fringes formed by spatial filtering of the developed film. A new technique is presented for reducing the noise level in spatially filtered speckle interferograms. Independent fringe patterns, obtained from one interferogram but with the filtering aperture sampling different regions of the Fourier transform plane, are digitised by a CCD camera and combined numerically. It is demonstrated that accurate analysis of fringe patterns by the Fourier transform method can be carried out, even if no carrier fringes are present. The measurements are compared with those obtained by speckle photography. Least-squares fitting of the theoretical displacement field is used to calculate the stress intensity factor at the crack tip as a function of time.