Laser Self-Mixing Sensor for Simultaneous Measurement of Young’s Modulus and Internal Friction

Abstract

The Young’s modulus and internal friction are two important parameters of materials. Self-mixing interferometry (SMI) is an emerging non-destructive sensing method that has been employed for various applications because of its advantages of simple structure, ease of alignment and high resolution. Some recent works have proposed the use of SMI technology to measure the Young’s moduli and/or internal frictions by measuring the resonance frequencies and damping factors of specimen vibrations induced by impulse excitation. However, the measurement results may be affected by frequencies of SMI fringes, and the implementation requires extra signal processing on SMI fringes. In this work, we developed an all-fiber SMI system without SMI fringes to measure the Young’s modulus and internal friction simultaneously. Simulations and experiments were carried out to verify the feasibility of the proposed method. Two specimens of brass and aluminum were tested. The experimental results show that the standard deviations of Young’s moduli for brass and aluminum are 0.20 GPa and 0.14 GPa, and the standard deviations of internal frictions are 4.0×10−5 and 5.4×10−5, respectively. This method eliminates the influences of the SMI fringe frequency on the resonant frequency and requires no signal processing on SMI fringes, contributing to its simplicity as a method for the measurement of the Young’s modulus and internal friction.

Keywords

• self-mixing interferometry
• optical feedback interferometry
• Young’s modulus
• internal friction
• laser diode
• laser sensor