No abstract

A novel spectroscopic method, named quartz-enhanced photoacoustic spectroscopy-conductance spectroscopy (QEPAS-CS), was first developed for gas mixture analysis. In QEPAS-CS, the advantage of photoacoustic detection and conductance analysis was realized by a quartz tuning fork (QTF). Two-component gas analysis was done by photoacoustic detection and conductance detection. For an explicit application, natural spider silk was used as a water vapor transducer to modify the QTF, making a conductance sensing channel. A 2004 nm laser diode was used as an excitation source for a photoacoustic sensing channel. Such a QEPAS-CS sensor was used for H2O/CO2 gas mixture analysis in a cell incubator. This provides a solution to calibrate an infrared photoacoustic spectroscopy gas sensor. This example effectively confirms the capacity of multigas analysis by the QEPAS-CS sensor.

Non-contact quartz-enhanced photoacoustic spectroscopy (NC-QEPAS) was proposed and developed for trace gas analysis. The NC-QEPAS aims at solving the problem that the quartz tuning fork (QTF) must be immersed in the gases for photoacoustic wave transducing, which limits its application for corrosive and dusty gas sensing. In this work, the QTF was isolated from the gas, realizing “non-contact” detection. An elastic parylene film was synthesized and then patched to the slit of a QEPAS gas cell. With an optimized coupling effect, the parylene film shows a resonance enhancement with the QTF and acoustic micro-resonator, realizing non-contact photoacoustic detection of gas. The NC-QEPAS not only increases the photoacoustic signal amplitude but also decreases the background noise. Compared to traditional contact QEPAS with QTF immersed in the gas, the NC-QEPAS shows a signal-to-noise enhancement factor of 13. A normalized noise equivalent absorption coefficient of 8.8 × 10−9 cm−1 W Hz−1/2 was achieved. Allan deviation shows good long-term stability of the NC-QEPAS sensor. With an integration time of 1000 s, the developed QEPAS sensor shows a detection limit of 0.4 ppm. The detection limit can be further improved with longer integration time.

Spider silk is one of the hottest biomaterials researched currently, due to its excellent mechanical properties. This work reports a novel humidity sensing platform based on a spider silk-modified quartz tuning fork (SSM-QTF). Since spider silk is a kind of natural moisture-sensitive material, it does not demand additional sensitization. Quartz-enhanced conductance spectroscopy (QECS) was combined with the SSM-QTF to access humidity sensing sensitively. The results indicate that the resonance frequency of the SSM-QTF decreased monotonously with the ambient humidity. The detection sensitivity of the proposed SSM-QTF sensor was 12.7 ppm at 1 min. The SSM-QTF sensor showed good linearity of ~0.99. Using this sensor, we successfully measured the humidity of disposable medical masks for different periods of wearing time. The results showed that even a 20 min wearing time can lead to a >70% humidity in the mask enclosed space. It is suggested that a disposable medical mask should be changed <2 h.

In this Letter, clamp-type quartz tuning fork enhanced photoacoustic spectroscopy (Clamp-type QEPAS) is proposed and realized through the design, realization, and testing of clamp-type quartz tuning forks (QTFs) for photoacoustic gas sensing. The clamp-type QTF provides a wavefront-shaped aperture with a diameter up to 1 mm, while keeping Q factors > 104. This novel, to the best of our knowledge, design results in a more than ten times increase in the area available for laser beam focusing for the QEPAS technique with respect to a standard QTF. The wavefront-shaped clamp-type prongs effectively improve the acoustic wave coupling efficiency. The possibility to implement a micro-resonator system for clamp-type QTF is also investigated. A signal-to-noise enhancement of ∼30 times has been obtained with a single-tube acoustic micro resonator length of 8 mm, ∼20% shorter than the dual-tube micro-resonator employed in a conventional QEPAS system.