Sampling Moiré Methods for Strain and Deformation Measurement
Summary
Sampling Moiré methods exploit the interaction between a reference grating and an observed deformation-induced grating to generate low-frequency fringe patterns that are highly sensitive to displacement and strain. By deliberately undersampling the specimen’s grid image with a coarser reference grating, moiré fringes form as an optical magnification of minute deformations. Phase information extracted from these fringes permits full-field, non-contact measurement of in-plane displacements, normal strains, shear strains and, in advanced implementations, out-of-plane displacements. Developments in phase-shifting, multi-order sampling and stereoscopic imaging have extended the spatial resolution to the submicrometre scale and enabled three-dimensional deformation mapping. The technique is applicable to a wide range of materials, from metals and composites under mechanical loading to microelectronic packages undergoing thermal loading, offering rapid data acquisition and straightforward optical setups that can be integrated into industrial and research environments.
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Sampling Moiré Methods for Strain and Deformation Measurement publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in sampling moiré methods for strain and deformation measurement across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Sampling Moiré Method: An optical measurement technique that overlays a reference grating on a deformed specimen grid to produce moiré fringes which amplify and quantify displacement and strain.
Moiré Fringe: A low-frequency interference pattern arising from the superposition of two similar gratings with slight pitch or orientation differences, encoding deformation information.
Phase-Shifting: A method in which multiple images are recorded with controlled phase offsets between the reference and specimen grating to extract precise phase maps of moiré fringes.
Grating Pitch: The centre-to-centre spacing between adjacent lines of a periodic grating, which governs the sampling frequency and fringe magnification.
Shear Strain: The measure of angular distortion between two originally orthogonal material lines under load, often revealed by the gradient of the displacement field.
Phase Unwrapping: A computational process that reconstructs continuous phase values from wrapped phase data (limited to a 2π range) to yield true displacement or strain distributions.
References
- Two-dimensional Moiré phase analysis for accurate strain distribution measurement and application in crack prediction.. Optics Express (2017).
- Second-order moiré method for accurate deformation measurement with a large field of view.. Optics Express (2020).
- Stereo sampling moiré method for three-dimensional deformation mapping with a stereomicroscope.. Optics Express (2022).
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