Investigation of polymer and polymer/fibre composite materials with optical coherence tomography

Optical coherence tomography (OCT), a technique originally proposed for applications in the field of biomedical diagnostics, is shown to be an efficient measurement technique for a multitude of problems posed in technical engineering and material research. Especially advanced OCT modifications, involving ultrahigh-resolution (UHR) imaging and fast Fourier-domain (FD) techniques, show promising potential, as successfully demonstrated in this paper by a variety of applications from the field of polymer materials. Thin polymer films and multilayer structures as well as polymer blends and fibre-reinforced polymer composites are successfully evaluated by means of UHR-OCT and FD-OCT performed at different wavelengths. In addition, comparative measurements have been performed with confocal microscopy and synchrotron computed tomography to show the potential and advantages of the OCT measurement technique.