An optical system consisting of a rigid borescope was developed to measure surface temperatures inside full-metal internal combustion engines. The measurement principle is predicated on lifetime-based phosphor thermometry of the material Gd3Ga5O12: Cr. The system is designed to resolve the luminescence decay of thermographic phosphors temporally and two-dimensionally by the use of a CMOS high-speed camera. The device allows the visualization of the temperature distribution in an area of 9 mm in diameter. An application of this optical system inside an internal combustion engine is demonstrated, yielding temperature maps under fired and motored conditions in a full-metal engine for the first time.

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The Dante is an 18 channel X-ray filtered diode array which records the spectrally and temporally resolved radiation flux from various targets (e.g. hohlraums, etc.) at X-ray energies between 50 eV to 10 keV. It is a main diagnostics installed on the OMEGA laser facility at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, University of Rochester. The absolute flux is determined from the photometric calibration of the X-ray diodes, filters and mirrors and an unfold algorithm. Understanding the errors on this absolute measurement is critical for understanding hohlraum energetic physics. We present a new method for quantifying the uncertainties on the determined flux using a Monte-Carlo parameter variation technique. This technique combines the uncertainties in both the unfold algorithm and the error from the absolute calibration of each channel into a one sigma Gaussian error function. One thousand test voltage sets are created using these error functions and processed by the unfold algorithm to produce individual spectra and fluxes. Statistical methods are applied to the resultant set of fluxes to estimate error bars on the measurements.

The Fusion and Astrophysics (FAST) Data and Diagnostic Calibration Facility located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a state-of-the-art facility used to calibrate radiation based diagnostics and study atomic processes for investigating fusion and astrophysical plasmas. FAST has at its disposal a full suite of radiation generation and detection devices, including two electron beam ion traps: EBIT-I and SuperEBIT and an absolutely calibrated x-ray calorimeter spectrometer. FAST covers the energy range between 0.01 and 100 keV, and can thus be used to calibrate a variety of plasma diagnostics. Instrument parameters that can be calibrated include line profiles, transmission and reflection efficiencies, and the quantum efficiency of grating and crystal spectrometers and solid state detectors. FAST can be used to test fully integrated instrumentation, and is ideal for spectrometers and detectors to be flown on orbiting observatories, sounding rockets, used as ground support equipment to verify flight instrumentation, in laboratory astrophysics experiments, and to diagnose magnetic and inertial confinement fusion plasmas. Here we present an overview of the calibration capabilities of this facility including some results.

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