The pressure sensitive paint (PSP) has become a powerful tool for the surface pressure measurements in the windtunnel testing. This diagnostic method, however, is limited to the time-averaged measurements so far, because the temporal behavior of PSP has not been well understood. Present paper describes the experimental investigations on the time response of three pressure sensitive paints, PtOEP, H2TFPP and PtTFPP. The coating on which the PSPs are painted is a commercial porous silica thin-layer chromatography (TLC) plate. The sudden change in pressure is provided by a shock tube, and the luminescence change due to the pressure rise by an incident shock wave is detected by a photomultiplier. The results indicate that the characteristic response time is found to differ among the PSPs tested, and the shortest characteristic time is on the order of ten microseconds. The effect of the sudden change in gas temperature on the luminescence intensity is also investigated by using the contact surface of the shock tube flow, and it is found that the luminescence intensity depends only on the wall temperature and is affected little by the gas temperature.
