TWINNING PROGRAM WITH GEORGIA, ROMANIA, AND UKRAINE

Arkady Voloshin hosted Svitlana Berezhna, I. Franko Lviv State University, of Ukraine in June 1999. The initial results of the first year of their research were presented at the International Workshop "Optoelectronic and Hybrid Optical/Digital Systems for Image/Signal Processing--ODS'99," held in September 1999 in Ukraine. Berezhna's visit to the U.S. gave her the opportunity to study the technique of fringe unwrapping used in the Photomechanical Laboratory at Lehigh University while working with graduate students, who used this technique in their research projects. Voloshin and Berezhna continued to collaborate via the Internet.

Update--2000

In April 2000, Berezhna visited Lehigh University to discuss the experimental results that had been obtained at that point. Voloshin traveled to the Institute for Physical Optics in May 2000, where he was able to learn the experimentation routines and work on new ways of data analysis. His second visit during August was spent analyzing the data he and Berezhna had acquired during the summer. While there, they worked on their article, "Full-field automated photoelasticity by Fourier polarimetry using three wavelengths," which was submitted and accepted for publication to Applied Optics.

Throughout the visits, they discussed new ways to analyze data and explored the possibility to use less than three wavelengths for retardation measurements. The result of the work will be presented at the 2001 SEM Spring Conference. Plans for this project include developing new methodologies to handle experimental errors inevitable during data acquisition. Voloshin reports that this project may lead to a major breakthrough in the automated analysis of photoelastic data.