Real-Time and Quantitative Measurement of Crack-Tip Stress Intensity Factors Using Digital Holographic Interferometry

Detection of the crack in an object is a critical problem for the health monitoring of a transparent object. The real-time and quantitative measurement of the crack-tip stress intensity factor (SIF) remains an open issue. In this paper, an approach for real-time and quantitative measurement for the SIFs of a Mode I crack is presented based on digital holographic interferometry (DHI). A transmission digital holographic system is established to measure the phase difference of an object wave during loading. The expression to achieve the SIF from the phase difference is formulated. To enhance the accuracy of measurement, calibrated phase unwrapping based on least-squares and iteration and median filtering is applied to retrieve the actual phase from the noisy wrapped one. The SIFs of the Mode I crack in a transparent polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) specimen are measured by this approach. The results are compared with the theoretical ones to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.