Imaging Experiment of Electrical Discharge Using an Event Camera
managerWe attempted to capture the discharge from a Leyden jar charged by a Wimshurst electrostatic generator using the SilkyEvCam HD.
Because electrical discharges occur in an extremely short time, capturing such phenomena with a conventional RGB camera is very difficult and typically requires expensive high-speed cameras along with complex equipment such as trigger inputs.
However, by using an event camera, it is possible to easily capture ultra-fast phenomena that change on the order of 1 microsecond.
So, what were the results?
The recording was performed using metavision studio, and the data analysis was carried out with a program that had been previously developed for another purpose.
A single shot (equivalent to approximately 1 millisecond) of raw data was extracted and converted by the program into frame images at 1-microsecond intervals (about 1,000 frames), enabling data acquisition at microsecond resolution. Furthermore, these images were combined into an MP4 video shown below, which corresponds to footage equivalent to 1,000,000 fps played back at 30 fps.
