Elsevier – Scientific Paper – Photoacoustic Spectroscopy Sensor

Authors: Angelo Sampaolo, Chenren Yu, Tingting Wei, Andrea Zifarelli, Marilena Giglio, Pietro Patimisco, Huan Zhu, Haiqing Zhu, Li He, Hongpeng Wu, Lei Dong, Gangyi Xu, Vincenzo Spagnolo

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H2S quartz-enhanced photoacoustic spectroscopy sensor employing a liquid-nitrogen-cooled THz quantum cascade laser operating in pulsed mode.

ABSTRACT:

In this work, we report on a quartz-enhanced photoacoustic spectroscopy (QEPAS) sensor for hydrogen sulfide (H2S) detection, exploiting a liquid-nitrogen-cooled THz quantum cascade laser (QCL) operating in pulsed mode.

The spectrophone was designed to accommodate a THz QCL beam and consisted of a custom quartz tuning fork with a large prong spacing, coupled with acoustic resonator tubes.

The targeted rotational transition falls at 2.87 THz (95.626 cm−1), with a line-strength of 5.53 10-20 cm/mol. A THz QCL peak power of 150 mW was measured at a heat sink temperature of 81 K, pulse width of 1 μs and repetition rate of 15.8 kHz.

A QEPAS record sensitivity for H2S detection in the THz range of 360 part-per-billion in volume was achieved at a gas pressure of 60 Torr and 10 s integration time.