Improvement and validity of shock measurements using heterodyne laser interferometer

•We compared homodyne with heterodyne laser interferometers in shock measurements.•In experiment, heterodyne had higher measurement accuracy than homodyne.•In simulation, heterodyne was superior to homodyne as to measurement accuracy.•Measurement accuracy of heterodyne was simulated about noise and sampling frequency.

The improvement and validity of shock measurements using only the laser head (heterodyne laser interferometer) of a commercial laser Doppler vibrometer was investigated by comparing acceleration waveforms measured by a homodyne laser interferometer with those measured by a heterodyne laser interferometer. The acceleration waveforms were generated from the displacement waveforms obtained with a reference quadrature homodyne laser interferometer by applying a numeric differentiation process twice. The differences between the two acceleration waveforms were found to be small with the measurement uncertainty in case of high acceleration level. In a further investigation, the accuracy of the shock measurements taken by the homodyne and heterodyne laser interferometers were compared in computational simulation. The results indicated that the accuracy of the heterodyne laser interferometer was superior to that of the homodyne laser interferometer.