Development of afterglow time test system for nanosecond fluorescent screen of low-level-light image intensifier

The time characteristics of fluorescent screen is one of the important parameters to evaluate the performance of image intensifier. At present, there is no measurement method for the afterglow time of nanosecond fluorescent screen of low-level-light image intensifier. Based on the traditional test scheme of image intensifier afterglow time, a afterglow time test system for nanosecond fluorescent screen was developed. This system used a high-speed signal generator with the sampling rate of 250 MHz to complete the excitation of the laser diode light pulse, and a photomultiplier tube was used with the descending time of 0.57 ns to complete the photoelectric conversion of the fluorescent screen light signal. The weak photocurrent signal of µA magnitude was amplified and converted to a single-terminal differential circuit to complete the AD conversion in AD9684. Then the digital luminance information of the fluorescent screen was stored in the double data rate SDRAM (DDR) unit after field programmable gate array (FPGA), and the host computer sent instructions to read the DDR memory. The USB3.0 high-speed transmission protocol was used to transmit data to the host computer. In the data processing, the Kalman filtering and fast finding falling edge algorithm were used to realize the accurate measurement of noise filtering from collected data and afterglow time. The test results show that the proposed afterglow time test system for nanosecond fluorescent screen can effectively test the image intensifier with ultrafast optical characteristics. The afterglow test results of P47 phosphor reaches 118. 094 4 ns, and the repeatability reaches 2.08%.