Demystifying the Black Box: Improving Detection Limits

Abstract

One of six IDRC 17 Student award recipients, Ryan Lerud is in the PhD programme at Portland State University, being co-advised by Peter Moeck of the Physics Department and Shankar Rananavare of the Chemistry Department. Ryan has been using multivariate statistics to develop a NIR/Vis Portable Fruit Quality Meter as part of his Masters thesis and on-going internship with Felix Instruments, Camas, WA. In this article, Ryan discusses instrument design, the impact that design has on fluctuating temperature and voltage and the effect of the latter on model performance.

An Experiment on the Effects of Detector Design and Thermal Properties as a Function of Noise

“…(Ryan is now a Director on the Governing Board of CNIRS and congratulations are warranted.-Ed.) I n the April/May 2015 edition of NIR news, 1 I discussed the impact of poor thermal management in handheld spectrometers which affects the emission profile of a commonly used tungsten lamp. In this article, I will discuss how detector temperature fluctuations alter the quality of spectra collected from a Zeiss MMS-1 VIS/NIR spectrometer (Carl Zeiss Pty Ltd, Germany).…”