USING THE HETERODYNE METHOD TO MEASURE VELOCITIES ON SHOCK PHYSICS EXPERIMENTS

We developed a velocimeter system several years ago that uses the heterodyne method [1]. This system is assembled from commercially available components that were developed for the telecommunications industry. There are several advantages of this system over the traditional VISAR method that has made it increasingly popular. This system is compact, portable, and relatively inexpensive. The maximum velocity of this system is determined by the electrical bandwidth of the electronics and the digitizer sample rate. The maximum velocity for the system described here is over 5 km/s.