Optical coherence elastography for measuring the deformation within glass fiber composite

Appl Opt. 2014 Aug 1;53(22):5070-7. doi: 10.1364/AO.53.005070.

Abstract

Optical coherence elastography (OCE) has been applied to the study of microscopic deformation in biological tissue under compressive stress for more than a decade. In this paper, OCE has been extended for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, to deformation measurement in a glass fiber composite in the field of nondestructive testing. A customized optical coherence tomography system, combined with a mechanical loading setup, was developed to provide pairs of prestressed and stressed structural images. The speckle tracking algorithm, based on 2D cross correlation, was used to estimate the local displacements in micrometer scale. The algorithm was first evaluated by a test of rigid body translation. Then the experiments were carried out with the tensile test and three point bending on a set of glass fiber composites. The structural features and structural variations during the mechanical loadings are clearly observed with the presented displacement maps. The advantages and prospects for OCE application on glass fiber composites are discussed at the end of this paper.