Photopolymer diffractive optical elements in electronic speckle pattern shearing interferometry

In this paper we present an electronic speckle pattern shearing interferometer using a photopolymer diffractive optical element in the form of a holographic grating, in combination with a ground glass to shear the images. The sheared images on the ground glass are further imaged onto a CCD camera. The distance between the grating and the ground glass can be used to control the shear and to vary the sensitivity of the system. The direction of sensitivity is easily controlled by rotation of the diffraction grating around its normal. Introducing photopolymer holographic gratings in ESPSI gives the advantage of using high aperture optical elements at relatively low cost. The fact that the diffractive optical element is a photopolymer layer on glass substrate with thickness of 2 mm makes for a compact optical system. The system was successfully used for detection of the resonant frequencies of a vibrating object. Most of the published work on vibration analysis is analytical. Very few experimental results are available in the literature. The well known laser Doppler vibrometers (LDV) and accelerometers used for modal analysis are pointwise measurement techniques, although multipoint LDV is available at significant cost. Electronic speckle pattern techniques suitable for experimental detection of the resonant frequencies of vibrating objects are very promising for vibration analysis because they are whole field and non-contact. A finite element model is developed for prediction of the vibration modes of the object under test. Detection of vibrational modes of aluminium diaphragm is demonstrated and compared with the theoretical model. The results obtained are very promising for future application of ESPSI systems with HOEs, for modal analysis. A significant advantage of shearography over electronic speckle pattern interferometry is that ESPSI is relatively insensitive to external disturbances. Another advantage of the proposed system is that it could be easily converted to a phase-shifting electronic speckle shearing interferometer. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.