Speckle interferometric technique to assess soap films

Abstract

An speckle interferometric technique to monitor the thinning process of vertical soap film before the film rupture is presented -- The interferometric arrangement consists in a double aperture pupil optical system which images an input diffuser -- In a first step, a reference specklegram is stored in the computer buffer memory -- Afterwards, the soap film is located in front of one pupil aperture, an uniform displacement of the diffuser is produced and a new speckle pattern is stored -- The soap film status is characterized in terms of the changes that this dynamic phase object introduces in the correlation fringes obtained by applying a FFT algorithm to the resulting summed specklegram. This procedure is done in real time as far as the soap film evolves in the successive status -- It is experimentally demonstrated that the soap film during drawing acts as a variable wedge -- The correlation fringes behavior becomes an important tool to establish the wedge shaped soap film angle and the thickness variations 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved