Abstract
Enhancement of trace gas detectability using photoacoustic spectroscopy requires the effective suppression of strong background noise for practical applications. An upgraded infrared broadband trace gas detection configuration was investigated based on a Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer equipped with specially designed T-resonators and simultaneous differential optical and photoacoustic measurement capabilities. By using acetylene and local air as appropriate samples, the detectivity of the differential photoacoustic mode was demonstrated to be far better than the pure optical approach both theoretically and experimentally, due to the effectiveness of light-correlated coherent noise suppression of non-intrinsic optical baseline signals. The wavelet domain denoising algorithm with the optimized parameters was introduced in detail to greatly improve the signal-to-noise ratio by denoising the incoherent ambient interference with respect to the differential photoacoustic measurement. The results showed enhancement of sensitivity to acetylene from 5 ppmv (original differential mode) to 806 ppbv, a fivefold improvement. With the suppression of background noise accomplished by the optimized wavelet domain denoising algorithm, the broadband differential photoacoustic trace gas detection was shown to be an effective approach for trace gas detection.