A speckle patterning study for laboratory-scale DIC experiments

Abstract

A “good” speckle pattern enables DIC to make its full-field measurements, but oftentimes this artistic part of the DIC setup takes a considerable amount of time to develop and evaluate for a given optical configuration. A catalog of well-quantified speckle patterns for various fields of view would greatly decrease the time it would take to start making DIC measurements. The purpose of this speckle patterning study is to evaluate various speckling techniques we had readily available in our laboratories for fields of view from around 100 mm down to 5 mm that are common for laboratory-scale experiments. The list of speckling techniques is not exhaustive: spray painting, UV-printing of computer-designed speckle patterns, airbrushing, and particle dispersion. First, we quantified the resolution of our optical configurations for each of the fields of view to determine the smallest speckle we could resolve. Second, we imaged several speckle patterns at each field of view. Third, we quantified the average and standard deviation of the speckle size, speckle contrast, and density to characterize the quality of the speckle pattern. Finally, we performed computer-aided sub-pixel translation of the speckle patterns and ran correlations to examine how well DIC tracked the pattern translations. We discuss our metrics for a “good” speckle pattern and outline how others may perform similar studies for their desired optical configurations.