The impact phenomena of solid micro-particles have gathered increasing interest across a wide range of fields, including space debris protection and cold-spray additive manufacturing of large, complicated structures. Effective motion monitoring is essential to understanding the impact behaviors of micro-particles. Consequently, a convenient and efficient micro-particle motion monitoring solution is proposed based on continuous single-frame multiple-exposure imaging technology. This method adopts a camera with excellent low-light performance coupled with high-frequency light-emitting diode (LED) flashes to generate short interval illumination. This technology can, in theory, achieve 1 million effective frames per second (fps) and monitor particles as small as 10 microns with speeds up to 12 km/s. The capabilities of the proposed method were validated by a series of micro-particle motion monitoring experiments with different particles sizes and materials under varying camera configurations. The study provides a feasible and economical solution for the velocity measurement and motion monitoring of high-speed micro-particles.
Keywords: high-frequency light-emitting diode flash; micro-particles’ impact; motion monitoring; single-frame multiple-exposure.