Space charge dynamics investigation based on Kerr electro-optic measurements and processing of CCD images

The Kerr electro-optic technique is used to investigate electric field and space charge effects using large Kerr constant propylene carbonate as the dielectric liquid with Kerr constant B≈1.22×10^-12 m/V². However, improved accuracy of this technique to measure space charge distributions remains an important goal. This paper describes inversion algorithm research on obtaining accurate space charge distributions from Kerr measurements. The original charge-coupled device (CCD) image of light intensity was converted into grayscale values for improved calculation. The grayscale CCD image was transformed into the frequency domain through a two-dimensional Fourier transformation. Butterworth filtering techniques were employed for edge enhancement algorithms. The most important parameter for calculation of space charge distributions are the integer fringe numbers n in the sequence of light and dark fringes measured by the CCD camera. Comparison of the improved algorithm and traditional methods for calculating electric field and space charge distributions between a pair of stainless steel parallel plate electrodes was investigated. The space charge dynamics were also calculated after processing the CCD images with some improvements. The results showed the electric field was essentially uniform at early times of pulsed high voltages. This uniformity indicated the absence of space charge during the early transient interval, while a bipolar charge injection was found in the central region between electrodes at later times. For longer times the electric field and space charge distributions slowly became uniform again. Grayscale processing and Butterworth filtering played an important role in the improvement of the algorithm for better image quality and edge enhancement.