Abstract:Digital shearography (DS) is a whole-field non-contacting optical method for nondestructive testing (NDT) of subsurface flaws and strain measurement. In this paper, we describe a novel phaseshifting technique in DS for nondestructive evaluation (NDE) and NDT of quasi dynamic behaviour of objects subject to varying loads. A Wollaston lens, a precise wave plate device and a polariser are employed to introduce constant phase differences between two shearing wavefronts. The wave plate device is in front of the polariser, which has a transmissive wavefront distortion of less than 1/8 wavelength. Phase difference can be adjusted by rotating the polariser. The rotation for angle adjusting can be easily carried out according to the requirement of the phase shifting. In this technique, the phase shifting is performed only on the static images of the object before deformation or loading. By setting the angle of the polariser to 0º, -60ºand 60º, three speckle patterns with the defined phase differences are captured, and are referred to as initial speckle patterns I1,0, I1,-60 and I1,60. Afterwards, the polariser is reset to 0º before loading. The speckle pattern I0 is treated as a base pattern, and will be subtracted from the subsequent speckle patterns which are captured in the quasi dynamic deformation process.During the quasi dynamic deformation process, the optical path and the entire optical set-up will be kept unchanged, and a series of speckle patterns (I m,0 , m=2,3,…..) which carry the deformation information will be quickly captured. In the meantime, fast image subtractions will be performed. The speckle fringes (I m,0 -I 1,0 ) will be displayed in real-time. In detailed post-processing, phase of differences method (PDM) [1] is used to extract phase information from the speckle images Im,0 -I 1,0 , I 1,0 , I 1,-60 and I 1,60 . Specifically, when a three phase step technique is employed, the phase of the fringe pattern (Im,0-I1,0) can be calculated from (I m,0 -I 1,0 )+ I 1,0 -I 1,-60 , (I m,0 -I 1,0 ), and (I m,0 -I 1,0 )+ I 1,0 -I 1,60 . Because this temporal phase shifting is not performed in the deformation process, the technique is suitable for NDT and NDE of quasi dynamic deformation behaviour of an object.The technique only requires three speckle patterns with phase differences prior to the object deformation. When a varying or quasi dynamic load is applied on the object, no physical phase shifting is needed to be conducted when sequential speckle patterns are recorded by a digital camera during the deformation process. Compared with the (5, n) temporal phase shifting techniques [2] using a PZT driver, the proposed technique has three main advantages. Firstly, it does not need a tedious calibration process for phase shifting. Secondly, the optical set-up is relatively simple. Thirdly, the speckle fringe patterns which will reflect the underlying defect can be displayed in realtime. Compared with the spatial phase shifting techniques using a phase mask [3,4] which are at the sacrifice of a weakened ...