Fupeng Wang

High-sensitive measurement of water vapor: shot-noise level performance via a noise canceller

Taking advantages of distributed feedback laser diode a technique is described to achieve high-sensitive measurement for water vapor concentration. This technique, with a modified balanced ratio metric detection system, has improved the accuracy of measured absorption spectrum by two main aspects. Improvement by matching equivalent conductivity of signal or reference photo detector (PD) is presented, and with the additional matched resistance suppression for the power variation in the signal-beam has been improved from 53 to 88 dB. The importance of integrating amplifier bandwidth design from the circuit to the measured absorption spectrum has been demonstrated in our experiment. For a scan rate of 32 Hz with an optimal corresponding bandwidth of 15.9 kHz, the absorption spectrum is well described by Voigt profile, with a difference of 1% at an atmosphere pressure of 1 atm and a room temperature of 296 K. With the application of averaging and filtering, absorption sensitivity of 1.093×10(-6) for water vapor at 1368.597 nm has been demonstrated, and the corresponding concentration is 71.8 ppb in just a 10 cm path length.

Measurement and analysis of water vapor inside optical components for optical fiber H2O sensing system.

Water vapor existing inside internal end-face gaps of optical components of an optical fiber H2O sensing system makes it possible to influence the measurement accuracy and stability. The influence principle has been briefly analyzed based on the structure of three main optical components: a distributed feedback laser diode (DFB-LD), a collimator, and a photoelectric diode (PD). With application of a differential technique, the influence of water vapor inside the DFB-LD can be removed. With reasonable recombination of the collimator and the PD in a dual-beam detection system, the influence of water vapor inside the collimator and the PDs end-face gaps has been suppressed from more than 1.57×10(-3) to as low as -2.175×10(-5) in absorbance. After H2O isolation processing water vapor inside the end-face gaps of the DFB-LD, the collimator, and the PD can be utilized as a reference to design a simple but feasible H2O sensor. As a result, good linearity with an R2 of 0.9964 has been realized in a concentration range of 39-2110 ppm during an application test, and a long-term test of the designed H2O sensor against the S8000 with a difference of 10 ppm has been achieved.

Continuously Wavelength-Tunable Light Source With Constant-Power Output for Elimination of Residual Amplitude Modulation

A continuously wavelength-tunable light source with constant-power output is presented. The unwanted optical power modulation companying with the wavelength modulation of the distributed feedback laser diode by the injection current is successfully offset by the external amplitude modulation of electro-optic modulator. The optical power stability has been experimentally demonstrated better than 1.2% in a wavelength-tunable range of 0.876 cm-1. The background baseline appearing in the direct absorption spectrum can be removed with the new light source. Not only that, the spectral distortion of the second harmonic signal caused by residual-amplitude modulation can also be largely eliminated. Experimental results have shown that the new light source is more suitable to be served as a pure wavelength-tuning reference source for different modes of spectroscopic measurement.

Acousto-Optic Q-Switched Fiber Laser-Based Intra-Cavity Photoacoustic Spectroscopy for Trace Gas Detection

We proposed a new method for gas detection in photoacoustic spectroscopy based on acousto-optic Q-switched fiber laser by merging a transmission PAS cell (resonant frequency f0 = 5.3 kHz) inside the fiber laser cavity. The Q-switching was achieved by an acousto-optic modulator, achieving a peak pulse power of ~679 mW in the case of the acousto-optic modulation signal with an optimized duty ratio of 10%. We used a custom-made fiber Bragg grating with a central wavelength of 1530.37 nm (the absorption peak of C2H2) to select the laser wavelength. The system achieved a linear response (R2 = 0.9941) in a concentration range from 400 to 7000 ppmv, and the minimum detection limit compared to that of a conventional intensity modulation system was enhanced by 94.2 times.

Demodulation algorithm used in single-beam system immune to light power drift.

A demodulation algorithm based on the head-tail technique is proposed for single-beam water vapor detection under rough environmental conditions, which is immune to fluctuations of light power. In the head-tail technique, collected data are processed by adding the head and tail data together and gradually approaching the center. The majority of photocurrent attenuation caused by optical loss can be effectively compensated by combining an optical intensity normalization coefficient in the method. The experiment indicates that, when the light power attenuates 4%, the deviation in a single-beam system is 1.29%, which is obviously superior to a dual-beam subtraction system whose deviation is 8.45%. The connection and advantages compared to a previous single-beam detection system have been discussed. The whole arrangement is simply designed without a beam splitter, of which the reliability and validity are fully verified by the experimental results.