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UV paint

I bought a six-pack of UV glow paint on ebay...

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and tried pulsing all the colors with a 365 nm UV led.

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I measured the light on my trusty PH200 o/e converter. If I move the card around so that the PH sees just the UV bouncing off the card, I get hardly any signal. There is some visible blue light coming from the LED, and even a bit of orange. The PH response peaks around 900 nm and is basically dead at 365.

I can slide the card to whack the various phosphors. The orange was best, giving over 10x the response from the LED alone. The two reds were almost as good, and the others were pretty wimpy.

What's interesting is the risetime, about 100 ns, which is the native PH200 step response. So these cheap phosphors are fast.

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These phosphors are more efficient cold, maybe 15% better if spritzed with freeze spray.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com 

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom laser drivers and controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro   acquisition and simulation
Reply to
John Larkin
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Some will glow better with a UV fluro tube rather than an LED (its a different wave length)

Reply to
David Eather

That wavelength is a bit short for most cheap phosphors. Try 400-410nm. regds. JB

Reply to
JB

I'm actually interested in converting wavelenghts that regular silicon photodiodes can't see, in the 200-400 range. I'm just playing around at this point. I also don't know if UV will damage these phosphors, long-term. I'd probably buy "professioal" phosphors if this ever became real. Still, these cheap ones are impressive.

The shortest wavelength LED that I can easily get is 355. An LED is a good source because I can get fast, clean pulses out of it.

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John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
Reply to
John Larkin

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