Overview of Photoelasticity and Digital Photoelasticity

Abstract

Stress analysis is a very important process in design of machine elements which can be classified

into three fields: analytical stress analysis, numerical stress analysis, and experimental stress analysis.

Although the numerical stress analysis. especially the finite element analysis (FEA), is nowadays the dominant

method, there Is another experimental method being widely used in stress analysis. This method is well known

as photoelasticity. The photoelasticity provides information in the whole-field sense which easily enables the

stress analysis: however, it has several limitations such as the analyst has to deeply know about the theory of

photoelasticity and the operation of analysis Is very tedious. As a consequence, photoelastlcity had been

ignored from the use as the stress analysis method for several years. With the advent of a computer and

associated technology. a new field called digital photoelasticity Is invented based on the combination of the

conventional photoelastlclty and such computer technology. The digital photoelasttcity is superior to the

conventional photoelasticity in the sense of the analysis efficiency. Furthermore. with a new technology called

a rapid prototyping, the production of photoelaslic models can be very simple even though the complex

models need to be made With this new technology, the power of digital photoelasticity is enhanced enormously in near future.