The development of electronics for a high-speed imaging particle sizing system

Given a requirement for a multipurpose particle sizing instrument, an imaging optical particle sizer capable of resolving 3 μm particles traveling at up to 400 m/sec has been developed. The fiber-optic array concept was chosen as the operating principle for the instrument. Using this approach, a 32-element linear fiber-optic array is uniformly illuminated by a laser beam. The shadows of small particles moving through the laser beam are projected onto the fiber array, and the size of a particle is determined by the number of fibers occulted. This thesis describes the development of the electronic hardware used to detect and process the shadows. Wide bandwidth analog detector/preamplifier modules are described along with the digital hardware neccessary for storing and processing the data. A complete instrument is presented which is capable of near-real-time presentation of reduced data. Laboratory calibration results are also included.