Quartz Enhanced Photoacoustic Spectroscopy Based Gas Sensor with a Custom Quartz Tuning Fork

Abstract

We have fabricated a custom quartz tuning fork (QTF) with a reduced fundamental frequency, a larger gap between the prongs and the best quality factor in air at atmospheric conditions ever reported. Acoustic microresonators have been added to the QTF, these were optimized through experiments. We demonstrate a normalized noise equivalent absorption of 3.7 × 10−9 W·cm−1·Hz−1/2 for CO2 detection at atmospheric pressure. Influence of the inner diameter and length of the microresonators has been studied as well as the penetration depth between the QTF prongs.

Keywords

• photoacoustic
• QEPAS
• spectroscopy