An explosion hitting metal causes its temperature to spike by thousands of degrees. It happens so fast, blink and you’ll miss it. In fact, no existing camera can detect the dramatic temperature change, making research into how materials hold up in extreme environments difficult.

University of Rhode Island mechanical engineering Professor Arun Shukla plans to change that. Armed with a $75,000 grant from the Rhode Island Science and Technology Advisory Council awarded in July 2014, he’s sketching out a super high-speed imaging system. As envisioned, the device will rely on infrared to record the temperature of a surface at 10 million frames per second. By way of comparison, a mid-range digital camera records about 4 frames per second.

The device will also detect changes across an area of just 2 square millimeters, about the twice the size of a pinhead, with a spatial resolution of 10 millionth of a meter. Within that area, Shukla hopes to measure the temperature in five distinct regions.

“No one has measured these temperatures on this scale until now,” Shukla says. “If this works, we will open up avenues for us to do work where temperatures rise very, very fast.”

That’s of great interest to defense officials interested in understanding how armor holds up to explosions. Defense researchers could also utilize the equipment to precisely measure the heat spots in explosives to better understand their impact.

On an academic level, a high-speed imaging system opens the door to better understanding shear banding, an intense strain that can cause materials to buckle.

Shukla will use the funding from the council to work with Brown University to construct a prototype infrared imaging system. Shukla will bring his years of expertise in studying how materials behave in extreme conditions. Brown University, led by engineering Associate Professor Pradeep Guduru, will lend its experience in designing circuity and will fabricate the computer chips that will power the device.

The team says that the device would be unprecedented and attract further research to Rhode Island. Eventually the idea could be commercialized and sold to others.

“Most of the equipment that’s on the market doesn’t come close to making measurements this quickly,” Shukla says. “We could change that.”