Investigation of tribology phenomena by low-coherence fiber-optic interferometry

We propose and. analyze a fiber-optic low-coherence interferometric (LCI) method for remote and non-contact investigation of the wearing rate and vibration in a standard pin-on-disc-tribology test. Our system is capable to measure displacement of the specimen/pin as well as very small amplitude of vibration of the pin occurring in a standard test. We obtained the pin position resolution better than 100 nm in the range of 400 /spl mu/m as well as minimal detectable amplitude of the pin vibration of about 10 pm//spl radic/Hz.