All-optical light-induced thermoacoustic spectroscopy for remote and non-contact gas sensing

Yufeng Pan; Jinbiao Zhao; Ping Lu; Chaotan Sima; Wanjin Zhang; Lujun Fu; Deming Liu; Jiangshan Zhang; Hongpeng Wu; Lei Dong

doi:10.1016/j.pacs.2022.100389

All-optical light-induced thermoacoustic spectroscopy for remote and non-contact gas sensing

Photoacoustics. 2022 Aug 10:27:100389. doi: 10.1016/j.pacs.2022.100389. eCollection 2022 Sep.

Authors

Yufeng Pan^{1

2}, Jinbiao Zhao^{1

2}, Ping Lu^{1

2

3}, Chaotan Sima^{1

2

3}, Wanjin Zhang¹, Lujun Fu¹, Deming Liu^{1

2}, Jiangshan Zhang⁴, Hongpeng Wu⁵, Lei Dong⁵

Affiliations

¹ Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics (WNLO) and National Engineering Research Center of Next Generation Internet Access-system, School of Optical and Electronic Information, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
² Shenzhen Huazhong University of Science and Technology Research Institute, Shenzhen 518000, China.
³ Wuhan OV Optical Networking Technology Co., Ltd., Wuhan 430074, China.
⁴ Department of Electronics and Information Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
⁵ State Key Laboratory of Quantum Optics and Quantum Optics Devices, Institute of Laser Spectroscopy and Collaborative Innovation Center of Extreme Optics, Shanxi University, Taiyuan 030006, China.

Abstract

All-optical light-induced thermoacoustic spectroscopy (AO-LITS) is reported for the first time for highly sensitive and selective gas sensing, in which a commercial standard quartz tuning fork (QTF) is employed as a photothermal detector. The vibration of the QTF was measured by the highly sensitive fiber-optic Fabry-Pérot (FP) interferometry (FPI) technique, instead of the piezoelectric detection in the conventional LITS. To improve the stability of the sensor system, a compact QTF-based fiber-optic FPI module is fabricated by 3D printing technique and a dual-wavelength demodulation method with the ellipse-fitting differential-cross-multiplication algorithm (DW-EF-DCM) is exploited for the FPI measurement. The all-optical detection scheme has the advantages of remote detection and immunity to electromagnetic interference. A minimum detection limit (MDL) of 422 ppb was achieved for hydrogen sulfide (H₂S), which was ~ 3 times lower than a conventional electrical LITS sensor system. The AO-LITS can provide a promising approach for remote and non-contact gas sensing in the whole infrared spectral region.

Keywords: Fiber-optic Fabry-Pérot interferometry technique; Gas sensor; Hydrogen sulfide detection; Light-induced thermoacoustic spectroscopy; Quartz tuning fork.