Measurement of strain distribution in plane metal plate by optical spatial filtering

A new quantitative measurement of strain distributions is performed by optical spatial filtering in an optical differentiation system. In this method, the strain distribution can be converted to the light intensity distributions in the image plane, and three strain components can be obtained by a microphotometric method from only a single specimen without time-consuming numerical calculations, such as in Moiré or photoelastic photoelastic methods. An experimental example is performed in order to show the practical usefulness of the present method, and some considerations on deterioration in the fidelity of the system performance are also given.