New improvements in shearography techniques

Shearography is a non-contact full field technique used in the assessment of spatial gradient of displacements through a preset direction, Hung and Taylor [1]. The optical set-up can be based on a Michelson interferometer scheme, for static or quasi-static measurements, and on the Mach- Zehnder interferometer if dynamic measurements have to be performed, Santos et al [2]. In both set-ups a speckle pattern, obtained from a rough surface, is laterally shifted to create the interference and the light used for the interferometer arms have a common path between the object and the set-up. So, this interferometric technique can be used with low coherence lasers and is almost insensitive to rigid body motion. The fringe patterns obtained with shearography result from the interference between two speckled wave fronts and have lower contrast that the ones obtained with specular reference interferometers