We frequently measure velocity-time histories of dynamic experiments. In some, the Doppler-shifted light is often weak compared to non-shifted light reflected from stationary surfaces and imperfections in components. With our Fabry-Perot (FP) based systems which handle multiple frequencies, data is lost where the fringes coincide; if we had used an intensity-measuring VISAR system, it would probably fail. We designed a facility for doing experiments under such conditions by selectively eliminating most of the non-shifted light. Our first filter excluded non-shifted light by a factor of 300 when manually tuned, and by 150 when run in an auto-tuning mode. It used a single 50 mm diameter FP as the filter with a spacing of 1.65 mm and reflectivities of 77%, and filters five channels prior to use in one of our 5-beam velocimeters. One use of the filter system was to embed optical fibers in long sections of explosives to make continuous detonation velocity-time histories. We have carried out many such tests with this filter, and two without. A special single-beam filter was constructed with a 40% efficiency for shifted light that rejected non-shifted light by 4 million times, with a bandpass of a few GHz.

Date Published: 1 August 2003
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 4948, 25th International Congress on High-Speed Photography and Photonics, (1 August 2003); doi: 10.1117/12.516818

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4948:
25th International Congress on High-Speed Photography and Photonics
Claude Cavailler; Graham P. Haddleton; Manfred Hugenschmidt, Editor(s)