Acrylic is widely used in aquariums, windows of planes and
submarines, and even scientific experiments like the Sudbury
Neutrino Observatory (SNO) and the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino
Observatory (JUNO). Internal stress has a significant impact on the
properties and characteristics of acrylic such as strength, fracture
and creep, which is highly concerned and has become a hotspot in
research field. The measurement of internal stress is an important
issue, which includes two aspects - the calibration of
stress-optical coefficient of acrylic and the measurement of
birefringence optical path difference (BOPD) caused by internal
stress. The measuring equipment mainly realize the measurement of
BOPD, and currently have the largest dynamic range of
50–3000 nm. Dynamic range is considered as one of the core
performance indicators of measuring equipment, and a larger dynamic
range is urgently required to meet the needs of different
scenarios. The novel equipment for measuring internal stress in
acrylic has been designed and developed based on photo-elastic
principle and spectrometric method, which has the dynamic range of
20–12000 nm and the uncertainty of stress measurement better than
3%. The measuring principle, components, functions and measurements
of the novel measuring equipment are introduced and discussed in
this article.