Interdiscipline between optoelectronic materials and mechanical sensors:Recent advances of organic triboluminescent compounds and their applications in sensing

Triboluminescence,also as known as mechanoluminescence,is an attractive optical behavior that means the light emitted from specific organic and inorganic materials when they are subjected to external forces,such as crushing,deformation,cleaving,vibration.Inorganic triboluminescent materials show great potential for applications in sensing,such as stress sensing,damage detection.However,the triboluminescent mechanism of organic materials should be pushed further as well as their application.In this review,we summarized the history of development and possible mechanism of organic triboluminescent materials,and discussed various applications in sensing field.At the same time,inspired by the existing research progress in inorganic triboluminescent materials,we proposed the flourishing development prospects of organic triboluminescent materials in stress sensors,movement monitoring,imaging stress distribution,visualization of crack propagation,structural diagnosis,and other fields.

Simultaneous imaging and measurement of tensile stress on cornea by using a common-path optical coherence tomography system with an external contact reference

The objective of this study is to demonstrate that tensile stress resulting due to applied force on cornea can be accurately measured by using a time-domain common-path optical coherence tomography （OCT） system with an external contact reference. The unique design of the common-path OCT is utilized to set up an imaging system in which a chicken eye is placed adjacent to a glass plate serving as the external reference plane for the imaging system. As the force is applied to the chicken eye, it presses against the reference glass plate. The modified OCT image obtained is used to calculate the size of contact area, which is then used to derive the tensile stress on the cornea. The drop in signal levels upon contact of reference glass plate with the tissue are extremely sharp because of the sharp decline in reference power levels itself, thus providing us with an accurate measurement of contact area. The experimental results were in good agreement with the numerical predictions. The results of this study might be useful in providing new insights and ideas to improve the precision and safety of currently used ophthalmic surgical techniques. This research outlines a method which could be used to provide high resolution OCT images and a precise feedback of the forces applied to the cornea simultaneously.

Residual stress determination in friction stir butt welded joints using a digital image correlation-aided slitting technique

This paper presents an incremental cutting method for evaluating the longitudinal residual stresses in a butt welded thin plate via combining the traditional residual stress measurement methods and the advanced optical technique.The proposed approach,which can be called digital image correlation（DIC）-aided slitting technique,introduces a successive extension slot to a specimen and employs the DIC technique to measure the released displacement profiles of the cutting sections after each cutting increment.Then the displacement profiles are used to directly calculate the residual stress distributions up to the slot tip and hence,a stress distribution can be obtained after a cutting increment.Finally,all of the stress distributions are averaged to ultimately determine the original residual stress field.This method does not include any complex experimental operations or tedious derivation,and the resolution of stress variation is greatly improved by the continuous measurement of the released displacements.The presented method has been preliminarily verified by a specimen with residual stress introduced by a four-point bending test.The results show that residual stresses determined by the DIC-aided slitting technique agree well with those from finite element（FE） prediction.The residual stress in a friction stir welded aluminum specimen obtained by the presented technique is also consistent with the evaluations given by X-ray diffraction.Furthermore,the residual stresses obtained by the DIC-aided slitting technique demonstrate higher accuracy and stability than the evaluations derived by the DIC-aided contour method.