Investigation of the metrological characteristics of the Pulsespi system applied to the precision inspection of thermal deformations

High-precision and reliable inspection of thermal deformations is necessary in terms of simulating the effects of space in the ground-based experimental processing of antennas and mirror systems of spacecrafts. Inspection of objects up to 1.5 m in size is considered in the paper. In practice, it can reach sizes up to 10 m. Requirements for thermal deformation are in range of 10-200 micrometers. The deformable surface is rough (Ra » λoptic). The measurement error, however, should not exceed ± 1 micron. The electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI) method is the most suitable for solving this problem. The method allows to inspection objects with a randomly inhomogeneous surface. The method assumes that it is necessary to calculate the wave phase values from the recorded picture by the digital matrix. It is the phase that contains information about the deformation, and the spatial phase shift method is used to calculate it. One of the measuring systems based on this method is the measuring system PulsESPI (Carl Zeiss Optotechnik GmbH production, Germany). It has a high sensitivity which is about 50 nm. However, this measuring system is designed for single measurements. In this regard, an additional software module for processing and visualization the result of a series of several hundred measurements has been developed. The experimental test bench with a test object has been developed to research the metrological characteristics of the PulsESPI system in accordance with thermal deformations measurements (multiple determinations). The PulsESPI system and the Renishaw XL-80 interferometer introduced into register of measuring instrumentation of Russian Federation were located on different sides of the object 1.5 m in size. As a result of measuring the surface displacement measured by the Renishaw XL-80 interferometer and its corresponding point from the PulsESPI system deformation map are compared. Three types of tests were carried out at the developed bench. The root-mean-square deviation of single measurements was no more than ± 0.2 μm. Error was no more than ± 1 μm when the series of measurements was conducted in which a total strain of 200 μm was obtained. The results obtained suggest the possibility of using this system for high-precision inspection of thermal deformations of large objects.