High-speed time measurement system based on binary optical representation

Photo-mechanics is an important experiment means to study the structural mechanics behaviour. At present, joint high-speed observation system has become an important method with multiple high-speed cameras, but unknown startup delays among cameras will decrease the system's accuracy. To address the problem caused by the asynchronization of multi-camera, a high-speed time measurement system is proposed to locate camera capturing time. Binary optical representation of time is adopted to design and implement the system. In order to reduce error in the system operating, three theorems are presented and proved to illustrate the essence of binary code. Based on that, an optimized algorithm is developed to transform optical representation to time information, and then the errors are evaluated mathematically. The experimental results show that the proposed system successfully locates time at microsecond level with a shutter time of 9.615 us and the optimized approach reduces the maximum error and standard deviation of error by 722 and 52 times respectively. The systematic method proposed in this paper contributes to practical applications efficiently and accurately.