Defect Detection

LED & Laser Safety Testing

Product Compliance Testing

Consultancy

Laser Optical offer a range of services for non-destructive testing which utilise lasers and the process of shearography. Shearography provides whole-field, non-contact, non-destructive testing for rapid wide-field inspection of composites, bonded structures and other advanced materials.

Shearography is an optical strain technique and an appropriately applied stress is used to locate strain concentrations caused by internal defects.

Laser Optical has two instruments to detect defects.

The Strain Mapper is used to determine both strain and surface changes on a range of materials whilst the Vacuum Hood applies pressure within a specific area. The benefits of both systems are that they are:

suitable for large or small areas
can be used in the factory or in-field

Shearography does not require any surface preparation prior to testing.

A number of case studies highlight the range of materials that these systems can be used on to detect deformation.

Steel skinned honeycomb structure – testing identified delaminations between the skin and core on a flat surface
GPR wind turbine blades – testing identified delaminations and disbands independently
Wrapped steel pipe – the pipe was thermally loaded and tested to detect the integrity of the fibre wrap. Testing highlighted 19 discontinuities in an 8 inch piece of pipe.

Laser Optical also offers a vibrational analysis service enabling you to see how components behave as part of a working system. The survey is carried out using a whole-field, non-contact vibration analysis technique and by looking for patterns on the surface of an item we can see how the vibration is passing through an object.

This technique is particularly applicable to internal combustion engines and their component parts but also gearboxes and other assemblies where revolving or oscillating parts are involved.