High-speed phase-shifting interferometry using triangular prism for time-resolved temperature measurement.

This study proposes a high-speed phase-shifting interferometer with an original optical prism. This phase-shifting interferometer consists of a polarizing Mach-Zehnder interferometer, an original optical prism, a high-speed camera, and an image-processing unit for a three-step phase-shifting technique. The key aspect of the application of the phase-shifting technique to high-speed experiments is an original prism, which is designed and developed specifically for a high-speed phase-shifting technique. The arbaa prism splits an incident beam into four output beams with different information. The interferometer was applied for quantitative visualization of transient heat transfer. In order to test the optical system for measuring high-speed phenomena, the temperature during heat conduction was measured around a heated thin tungsten wire (diameter of 5 μm) in water. The visualization area is approximately 90  μm×210  μm, and the spatial resolution is 3.5 μm at 300,000 fps of the maximum temporal resolution with a high-speed camera. The temperature fields around the heated wire were determined by converting phase-shifted data using the inverse Abel transform. Finally, the measured temperature distribution was compared with numerical calculations to validate the proposed system; a good agreement was obtained.