Preamplifier circuit noise is of great importance in quartz enhanced photoacoustic spectroscopy (QEPAS) system. In this paper, several noise sources are evaluated and discussed in detail. Based on the noise characteristics, the corresponding noise reduction method is proposed. In addition, a frequency locked technique is introduced to further optimize the QEPAS system noise and improve signal, which achieves a better performance than the conventional frequency scan method. As a result, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) could be increased 14 times by utilizing frequency locked technique and numerical averaging technique in the QEPAS system for water vapor detection.

A portable analog lock-in amplifier capable of accurate phase detection is proposed in this paper. The proposed lock-in amplifier, which uses the dual-channel orthometric signals as the references to build the xy coordinate system, can detect the relative phase between the input and x-axis based on trigonometric function. The sensitivity of the phase measurement reaches 0.014degree, and a detection precision of 0.1degree is achieved. At the same time, the performance of the lock-in amplifier is verified in the high precision optical oxygen concentration detection. Experimental results reveal that the portable analog lock-in amplifier is accurate for phase detection applications. In the oxygen sensing experiments, 0.058% oxygen concentration resulted in 0.1degree phase shift detected by the lock-in amplifier precisely. In addition, the lock-in amplifier is small and economical compared with the commercial lock-in equipments, so it can be easily integrated in many portable devices for industrial applications.

A distributed feedback diode laser (DFB-DL) based hygrometer combined with a long-path-length Herriot gas cell and waterless optical components was proposed and investigated. The main function of this sensor was to simultaneously improve the measurement reliability and resolution. A comparison test between a 10-cm normal transmission-type gas cell and a 3-m Herriot gas cell was carried out to demonstrate the improvement. Reliability improvement was achieved by influence suppression of water vapor inside optical components (WVOC) through combined action of the Herriot gas cell and waterless optical components. The influence of WVOC was suppressed from 726ppmv to 25ppmv using the Herriot gas cell. Moreover, combined with waterless optical components, the influence of WVOC was further suppressed to no more than 4ppmv. Resolution improvement from 11.7ppmv to 0.32ppmv was achieved mainly due to the application of the long-path-length Herriot gas cell. The results show that the proposed sensor has a good performance and considerable potential application in gas sensing, especially when probed gas possibly permeates into optical components.

A phase shift demodulation technique based on subtraction capable of measuring 0.03phase degree limit between sinusoidal signals is presented in this paper. A self-gain module and a practical subtracter act the kernel parts of the phase shift demodulation system. Electric signals in different phases are used to verify the performance of the system. In addition, a new designed optical source, laser fiber differential source (LFDS), capable of generating mini phase is used to further verify the system reliability. R-square of 0.99997 in electric signals and R-square of 0.99877 in LFDS are achieved, and 0.03degree measurement limit is realized in experiments. Furthermore, the phase shift demodulation system is applied to the fluorescence phase based oxygen sensors to realize the fundamental function. The experimental results reveal that a good repetition and better than 0.02% oxygen concentration measurement accuracy are realized. In addition, the phase shift demodulation system can be easily integrated to other applications.

An optical fiber gas sensor mainly consists of two parts: optical part and detection circuit. In the debugging for the detection circuit, the optical part usually serves as a signal source. However, in the debugging condition, the optical part can be easily influenced by many factors, such as the fluctuation of ambient temperature or driving current resulting in instability of the wavelength and intensity for the laser; for dual-beam sensor, the different bends and stresses of the optical fiber will lead to the fluctuation of the intensity and phase; the intensity noise from the collimator, coupler, and other optical devices in the system will also result in the impurity of the optical part based signal source. In order to dramatically improve the debugging efficiency of the detection circuit and shorten the period of research and development, this paper describes an analog signal source, consisting of a single chip microcomputer (SCM), an amplifier circuit, and a voltage-to-current conversion circuit. It can be used to realize the rapid debugging detection circuit of the optical fiber gas sensor instead of optical part based signal source. This analog signal source performs well with many other advantages, such as the simple operation, small size, and light weight.

Spontaneous combustion of the coal mine goaf is one of the main disasters in the coal mine. The detection technology based on symbolic gas is the main means to realize the spontaneous combustion prediction of the coal mine goaf, and ethylene gas is an important symbol gas of spontaneous combustion in the coal accelerated oxidation stage. In order to overcome the problem of current coal ethylene detection, the paper presents a mine optical fiber multi-point ethylene concentration sensor based on the tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy. Based on the experiments and analysis of the near-infrared spectrum of ethylene, the system employed the 1.62 μm (DFB) wavelength fiber coupled distributed feedback laser as the light source. By using the wavelength scanning technique and developing a stable fiber coupled Herriot type long path gas absorption cell, a ppm-level high sensitivity detecting system for the concentration of ethylene gas was realized, which could meet the needs of coal mine fire prevention goaf prediction.

A sensor array system formed by arranging four asymmetric distributed-feedback fiber lasers (DFB-FL) in ascending order according to their slope efficiencies was proposed. The output flatness could be effectively improved with the application of asymmetric DFB-FLs. The last element had almost the same output with the others although it obtained the smallest pump power. The relative intensity noise (RIN) and relaxation oscillation frequency of the sensor array were also analyzed. It is found that the relaxation oscillation frequency of a certain DFB-FL was relevant to its relative position in the array. And the RIN of a certain DFB-FL was always affected by the other elements in the array, which was not dependent on the order of their arrangement.

We proposed and demonstrated a wavelet transform modulus maxima (WTMM) de-noising method to decrease the temperature error. In this scheme, the composition scale was determined simply by the WTMM amplitude variation with the growth of the decomposition scale at 30 °C, and the signal WTMM was obtained by the wavelet decomposition modulus on every decomposition scale based on the modulus propagating difference between the signal and noise. Then, we reconstructed the signal using the signal WTMM. Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective for de-noising, allowing for a temperature error decrease of about 1 °C at 40 °C and 50 °C comparing to the original data.

In the field of near infrared H₂O sensing, the acquisition of the absorption signal usually is from a noisy background, thus it is important to adopt an effective signal demodulation method. This study introduced the research progress in the field of trace water vapor detection, covering different individual gas detection techniques. On the basis of the conventional double-beam differential absorption, the division method in voltage and the dual-peak method based on the differential value of two adjacent absorption lines have been studied. Voltage division has an excellent stability to temperature variation, mechanical extrusion, and fiber bend loss. The dual-peak method proved a linear relation with the water vapor concentration, and this method provided a way to measure the concentration at high pressure. Furthermore, the so called balanced ratiometer detection (BRD) was introduced. It has an outstanding self-adjusting capability, and it can also avoid an excess phase difference caused by the current-to-voltage converting circuit, thus this method has a high sensitivity. In addition, the second harmonic technique applied to gas detection was introduced, and for the high-frequency modulation via driving current, 1/f was suppressed apparently; as a result, this technique realized a better sensitive detection by one to two orders of magnitude.

The impact of microwave sweeper power fluctuation in the BOTDA system has been theoretically analyzed and experimentally tested. And a novel method comparing real-time acquisition of probe wave power with a new algorithm to realize probe wave power normalization for eliminating this impact was proposed. The principle of the proposed method was described theoretically. And the contrast test between our new method and conventional one was carried out. The experiment results indicated that the temperature accuracy was effectively improved from ±5 ℃ to ±2 ℃.