Segmented Thermal Flash Blindness Protection

In Dynamic Eye’s Phase I project, it was shown that a standard twisted nematic liquid crystal cell, when driven with the appropriate waveforms, can act with sufficient speed and contrast to provide flash blindness protection, even in a segmented shield. Segmenting the shields would improve the operational effectiveness of the aircrew by only darkening the portion of the shields between the operator’s pupils and the blinding light source while leaving the remainder of the field of view unaffected. Segmented shields could also prove useful in many other operational areas where laser threats, glare from the sun or other light sources impairs an operators ability to accomplish an assigned task. The work in this proposal will create fully functional liquid crystal flash blindness shields by assembling a specialized segmented sensor, a microcontroller, driver circuitry, and optimized segmented LC shields into two functioning prototypes.