PDV Workshop Archives

PDV Workshop Archives

The Photonic Doppler Velocimeter was developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in the early 2000s by Strand and Whitworth. The PDV was a novel design that mixed Doppler shifted laser light collected by a probe from a moving surface with a reference signal to generate a beat signal whose frequency is proportional to the velocity. The first data for an actual paying customer was in 2003. At that time, there was no software for data analysis. The data was processed using Excel spreadsheets to find the peaks of the beat waveform and to determine the average velocity over each half cycle. Once the PDV proved to be a viable diagnostic, a sliding Fourier transform code was written by Bill Kuhlow of MSTS to allow much faster and easier data analysis. Two basic 4-channel systems were built, and Strand and Whitworth spent the next few years fielding the PDV on a wide variety of experiments. The PDV provided high quality velocimetry data at a fraction of the cost of VISAR and Fabry-Perot, and was quickly copied by other labs for their own use. Eventually, the PDV became the diagnostic of choice for velocimetry on shock physics experiments at many laboratories.

In 2006, Strand hosted the first PDV workshop at LLNL. This was literally twenty guys (yes, they were all men at that time) sitting around a large table for one day giving talks to each other. The PDV was still a new diagnostic for everyone involved and the learning curve was very steep regarding the optimum hardware and analysis software. This workshop became an annual affair with around 20 talks presented at each meeting. All attendees selflessly shared what they had learned about improved hardware or new analysis software to make the PDV a better diagnostic.  After four years or so, the annual workshops started attracting more attendees. Eventually, the meetings had so many attendees and talks submitted that the meetings extended to two days of unclassified talks and one day of classified talks. Vendors were invited to show their products that applied to PDV. Banquet dinners were organized. Attendees were coming from around the world. There are even commercial vendors selling fully functional PDV systems that are controlled using cell phone apps. The PDV had evolved from a part time research project to a fully functional diagnostic.

The PDV archive contains talks from each of the workshops. There is a vast amount of information contained in this archive. A newcomer to PDV would do well to peruse the talks in the earliest workshops first. Everyone was learning the basics at that time and those talks represent that early learning phase. In later workshops, the talks presented new technology that had advanced in several directions. One of those directions was the notion of multiplexing, which became an important topic along with the introduction of the MPDV by Daykin. More recently, the talks tend to focus on the wide variety of experiments to which the PDV has been applied. Future workshops are bound to present new and exciting advances in the design and application of the PDV in the shock physics and energetic materials community. This archive is a wonderful source of information for the PDV diagnostic.

Further Resources

Dolan, D. H. (2020). “Extreme Measurements with Photonic Doppler Velocimetry (PDV).” Review of Scientific Instruments 91(5): 051501.

Strand, Oliver T. III (2020). Handbook for the Photonic Doppler Velocimeter, second edition.

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Presentations are linked to PDFs. Should you prefer a text-only format, please email shock@wsu.edu or call (509)335-5345.