Developing accurate quantified speckle shearing data

Electronic Speckle Pattern Shearing Interferometry (ESPSI) is becoming a common tool for the qualitative analysis of material defects in the aerospace and marine industries. Current trends in the development of this optical metrology nondestructive testing (NDT) technique is the introduction of quantitative analysis, which attempts to detail the defects examined and identified by the ESPSI systems. Commercial systems use divergent laser illumination, this being a design feature imposed by the typically large sizes of objects being examined, which negates the use of collimated optics. Furthermore, commercial systems are being applied to complex surfaces which distort the understanding of the instrumentation results. The growing commercial demand for quantitative out-of-lane and in-plane ESPSI for NDT is determining the quality of optical and analysis instrument. However very little attention is currently being paid to understanding, quantifying and compensating for the numerous error sources which are a function of ESPSI interferometers. This paper presents work which has been carried out on the measurement accuracy due to the divergence of the illumination wavefront and associated with the magnitude of lateral shearing function. The error is measured by comparing measurements using divergent (curvature) illumination with respect to collimated illumination. Results show that the error is increased by approximately a power factor as the distance from the illumination source to the object surface decreases.