Many camera companies offer the capability to image events at high speed, but one company has taken the technology one step further, enabling its users to rapidly capture images and precisely measure the temperature at different points during a high-speed event. Specialised Imaging (Tring, UK) has developed the new capability for its current SIM Ultra Fast framing camera.
Using a custom optical arrangement, 16 intensified CCD detectors inside the camera capture images of the same field of view sequentially. By using the 16 optical channels, the camera can capture images at the rate of 1 billion frames/s.
By fitting each optical channel with wavelength filters between 400 and 900 nm, PC-based software enables two images from two different wavelengths to give a precise temperature reading from selected points in the event under study.
Because the images must be downloaded to a PC for analysis, the system is suitable for making off-line temperature measurements after an event has taken place, rather than real-time temperature measurement.
The technique of using filter-based techniques to take temperature measurements was originally pioneered by engineers at Nobby Tech Ltd. (Tokyo, Japan) and Hiroshima University (Hiroshima, Japan) for use with high-speed video cameras. Now, thanks to the efforts of the engineers at Specialised Imaging, it would appear to have found a use in scientific imaging.
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