Synergetic Resonance Matching of a Microphone and a Photoacoustic Cell

Sensors (Basel). 2017 Apr 8;17(4):804. doi: 10.3390/s17040804.

Abstract

We propose an approach to match the resonant characteristics of a photoacoustic cell with that of a microphone in order to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio in the photoacoustic sensor system. The synergetic resonance matching of a photoacoustic cell and a microphone was achieved by observing that photoacoustic cell resonance is merged with microphone resonance, in addition to conducting numerical and analytical simulations. Using this approach, we show that the signal-to-noise ratio was increased 3.5-fold from the optimized to non-optimized cell in the photoacoustic spectroscopy system. The present work is expected to have a broad impact on a number of applications, from improving weak photoacoustic signals in photoacoustic spectroscopy to ameliorating various sensors that use acoustic resonant filters.

Keywords: acoustic resonance; mid-infrared spectroscopy; photoacoustic spectroscopy.