An approach to gas sensors based on tunable diode laser incomplete saturated absorption spectra*

Abstract

A spectral profile reconstruction method that can be applied to incomplete saturated-absorption spectra is proposed and demonstrated. Through simulation and theoretical calculation, it is proved that compared with the traditional whole-profile fitting method, this new method can increase the concentration detection upper limit of a single absorption line by about 8.7 times. High-concentration water vapor is measured using TDLAS technology, the total water vapor pressure and the self-broadened half-width coefficient of the spectrum were simultaneously measured from incomplete saturated-absorption spectra and compared with high-precision pressure sensors and the HITRAN databases. Their maximum relative deviations were about 4.63% and 9.10%, respectively. These results show that the spectral profile reconstruction method has great application potential for expanding the dynamic range of single-line measurements to higher concentrations, especially for in-situ online measurements under complex conditions, such as over large temperature and concentration dynamic ranges.