Shearography for non-destructive testing of specular reflecting objects using scattered light illumination

Abstract Shearography has been widely used in non-destructive testing due to its advantages of fast, full-field, and high sensitivity for nondestructive test and strain measurement. Shearography has been applied successfully to various industry applications. However, traditional shearography requires the surface under test to be sufficiently rough. This study presents a modified shearography setup that can be applied to workpieces with specular surface which is illuminated by light scattered from a rough plane to generate speckle patten. In the optical setup, the specular surface is conjugated to the phase map to simplify the positional correspondence between the interferogram and the internal defects. The sensitivity factor is analyzed through ray tracing method based on geometric optics which is influenced by the surface normal. The experimental results are described and presented as well.