A new method for non-destructive measurement of arbitrary 3D stress state using photoelasticity has been developed. The new approach proposed here, namely, load incremental approach, is an attempt to solve the nonlinear inverse problem of 3D photoelasticity by the linearization of the governing equation based on high resolution in load increment. As long as the applied load increment is small enough, this method works and can reconstruct arbitrary 3D stress state.
Results from numerical simulations show the effect of i) the number of the observations, ii) the independency of the observation directions, and iii) the material sensitivity on the performance of the proposed method.