An optical system has been proposed and verified experimentally for monitoring the torsion of a power transmission shaft in realtime. The system consists of a pair of lasers, mirrors and light receivers as a sensor head, and logic circuit, high-frequency oscillator, and computer as a data processing system. The smallest measurable angle of torsion can be expressed by ω/ƒ, where ω is the rotational frequency of the power transmission shaft and ƒ is the frequency of the oscillator. The experimental error was found to be a few percentage points.
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