Elastomeric seal stress analysis using photoelastic experimental hybrid method

Stress freezing is an important and powerful procedure in 3-dimensional experimental stress analysis using photoelasticity. The application of the stress freezing technique to extract stress components from loaded engineering structures has, however, declined over the years even though its principles are well established. This is attributed to huge costs arising from energy consumption during the process. In addition, significant time is needed to generate the desired information from isoclinic and isochromatic fringes. To overcome the limitations of stress freezing in photoelasticity and transform it into an economical device for stress analysis in an engineering environment, a new stress freezing cycle that lasts 5 h is proposed. The proposed technique is used in several applications of elastomeric seals with different cross-sectional profiles to assess their suitability. It was found that reducing the cycle time can lead to huge energy savings without compromising the quality of the fringes. Moreover, the use of isochromatic only to extract stress components leads to a shorter processing time to achieve desirable information since the process of obtaining isoclinic data is involving. In this paper, results of stress analysis from stress-frozen elastomeric seals with various cross-sections using the new stress freezing cycle are presented.