The future of our polarization systems in 2022
While many of our products deal mainly with cosmetic testing, we have also developed many systems over the years that pushed our expertise in polarization imaging further and further.
Capitalizing on this experience, we are now able to deliver complete systems that:
- deal with specific inquiries in different sectors (aviation, manufacturing, research lab)
- are entirely custom and follow the specifications of our clients
- can be adapted to a specific spectral range and/or polarization process
- are robust enough to be used in an industrial/factory environment
Future of SALSA
With the Covid-19 crisis, many of the industrial references we used in our optical systems had to be changed. It includes the liquid crystals that we use in our SAMBA and SALSA cameras.
For our SAMBA camera, we will probably shift towards a new type of camera (cf. below), but we are in the process of adapting a new type of liquid crystal to the SALSA so that we will be able to provide our Full-Stokes polarization imaging camera to our clients in 2022 and beyond.
The M3I system (Mueller Matrix Measurement Imaging)
The Mueller Matrix Measurement Imaging (M3I) system is currently available in short wave infrared and visible range and allows the :
- Acquisition of Mueller measurement data
- Calculation, display, and export of Mueller matrix and advanced polarization images (Polarizance, Depolarization, etc.)
- Simulation of the effect of a defined polarized or unpolarized homogeneous plane wave impinging on an element analyzed with the M3I system (Degree Of Polarization, Angle Of Polarization, Ellipticity, etc.).
This system is used to analyze and characterize transparent materials thoroughly and predict their behavior.
It has been specifically designed for a major European aerospace company.
POLKA
The Polka is a non-destructive no-contact magneto-optical sensor technology. Our first iteration of the system was used in an industrial environment to nondestructively detect magnetic traces with over 500 units sold.
More recently, we have used this technology to visualize small defects in metal pieces using a magnetic field.
Contrary to other existing methods, this technique does not require any contact with the surface to be tested (no particle or viewing system of any kind). This system can detect surface and sub-surface defects and directly recover an image of the defect without any scanning system.
We are currently testing the capabilities of our method on ferromagnetic material, but we are hopeful that we will be able to do similar tests on non-ferromagnetic materials as well, which would be a real breakthrough in industries using many composite materials.
Using the new SONY polarization sensors
Our SAMBA camera was one of our oldest systems as it was developed more than 15 years ago. But with the changes occurring with our liquid crystal suppliers, we have decided to discontinue our SAMBA line.
Thankfully, SONY has been developing imaging sensors with micro-polarizer arrays that will be able to replace our SAMBA difference-polarization camera. Our preliminary tests show no degradation in contrast ratio for a lower price. Hopefully, we will be able to use this new sensor to expand the applications in which we can use polarization imaging across industries.
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