Digital speckle technique applied to flow visualization

Digital speckle technique uses a laser, a CCD camera, and digital processing to generate interference fringes at the television framing rate. Its moss obvious advantage is that neither darkroom facilities nor photographic wet chemical processing is required. In addition, it can be used in harsh engineering environments. This paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of three digital speckle methodologies. (1) Digital speckle pattern interferometry (DSPI) uses an optical polarization phase shifter for visualization and measurement of the density field in a flow field. (2) Digital shearing speckle interferometry (DSSI) utilizes speckle shearing interferometry in addition to optical polarization phase shifting. (3) Digital speckle photography (DSP) with computer reconstruction. The discussion describes the concepts, the principles and the experimental arrangements with some experimental results. The investigation shows that these three digital speckle techniques provide an excellent method for visualizing flow fields and for measuring density distributions in fluid mechanics and thermal flows.