A Comprehensive Study on Safety-Indicating Parameters of High Flash Light Sources

The safety-indicating parameters including the exposure limit effective radiance, the effective radiance dose, and the recently proposed exposure limit distance are thoroughly investigated to examine utilization of these parameters to protect against retinal thermal damage from the high luminous intensity flashes. A comparative study of procedures to get safety-indicating parameters of high intensity flashes are also conducted. For the flash with radius of 1 m and duration of 1–100 ms, the ranges of the exposure limit effective radiance and the effective radiance dose are 1 × 10 6 – 8 × 10 7 W/m 2 -sr and 1 × 10 6 – 2 × 10 6 J/m 2 -sr, respectively, whereas that of exposure limit distance is 30–114 m. The study revealed that the use of the exposure limit distance is more indicative, informative, and even intuitive than using the exposure limit radiance as a safety-indicating parameter of high flashes in the field. It is thought that being included the exposure limit distance as one of the characteristic parameters of a flash may be highly suggestive, informative, so it may also be highly recommendable.