CRYSTA NOVA P16 High Speed Polarization Camera

The Photron Crysta NOVA P16 polarization high speed camera is used to quantify and measure physical stress in transparent and semi-transparent fluids and solids. The Photron Crysta P16 polarization camera system can measure at 16,000 fps in full resolution operation or at 1.1 million fps when running at reduced resolution.

The Photron Crysta P16 high-speed polarization camera for the two-dimensional analysis of birefringence measurements, film thickness analysis, and surface roughness inspection, and is a powerful tool to understand phenomena such as birefringence, retardation, stress and impact fracture mechanisms of materials and fluids. This systems employ mechanical or electrical drives as polarization modulators, they require several photo-detection processes to measure polarization. In order to overcome this problem, The Crysta NOVA P16 utilizes a ultra fast high-speed 2D birefringence measurement system with a maximon effective polarization sampling resolution of 512 x 512 pixles as the core device of the system with 16 parallel read out circuits in a matrix in the image sensor, which are connected to each pixel with individual A/D converters.

The image sensors design and fabrication incorporates a pixelated polarizer array which is made from photonic crystal bonded directly to the CMOS sensor, making the optical system in this sensor resistant to vibration. Each polarizer corresponds to each pixel of the image sensor with a one to one ratio. The size of each polarizer and pixel is 20 µm x 20 µm. In the polarizer array, groups of four neighboring polarizers (2 x 2) are set to have differing fast axis orientation at 0°, 45°, 90° and 135° in a clockwise arrangement. One polarization datum can be obtained by calculating detected light intensities from the four pixels of the image sensor. The parallel read-out circuit is arranged in a corresponding matrix.

The electric charges that represent the light intensities accumulated from each pixel are quantized by the multi-channel Analog/Digital converters and are stored in the memory of the camera. Once that is done. the software apply a phase shift analysis process to the stored data to obtain time-serial images of birefringent phase difference.