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.