Spectroscopy transducers

The first detector for optical spectroscopy was the human eye, which, of course, is limited both by its accuracy and its limited sensitivity to electromagnetic radiation. Modern detectors use a sensitive transducer to convert a signal consisting of photons into an easily measured electrical signal. Ideally the detector s signal, S, should be a linear function of the electromagnetic radiation s power, P,... 

Thermal Transducers Infrared radiation generally does not have sufficient energy to produce a measurable current when using a photon transducer. A thermal transducer, therefore, is used for infrared spectroscopy. The absorption of infrared photons by a thermal transducer increases its temperature, changing one or more of its characteristic properties. The pneumatic transducer, for example. 

The experimental design for the photoacoustic experiment is relatively simple. The apparatus is quite similar to that employed for nanosecond absorption spectroscopy with the major difference being that a piezoelectric transducer is used to monitor the acoustic waves rather than a photomultiplier tube to analyze the incident light. A representative schematic for PAC is shown in Fig. 2. 

The combination of selectivity of biochemical origin with the high intrinsic selectivity of optical spectroscopy makes the optical sensors potentially the most selective of all types of chemical sensors. It is not surprising, because most bioassays use optical detection. Moreover, the coupling requirements between the primary interactions in the selective layer and the transducer part of the sensor are relatively simple. The molecule that provides the signal (absorber) merely has to be present in the optical path in order to be counted. 

Ultrasonic spectroscopy has been utilized for real-time measurements of polymerization reactions and polymer melt extrusion.15,16 In these applications the time required for the ultrasonic waves to propagate through the sample to a transducer was measured. The velocity of the sound wave in the medium is related to the modulus and density of the sample matrix. 

A chemical sensor is a device that transforms chemical information into an analytically useful signal. Chemical sensors contain two basic functional units a receptor part and a transducer part. The receptor part is usually a sensitive layer, therefore a well founded knowledge about the mechanism of interaction of the analytes of interest and the selected sensitive layer has to be achieved. Various optical methods have been exploited in chemical sensors to transform the spectral information into useful signals which can be interpreted as chemical information about the analytes [1]. These are either reflectometric or refractometric methods. Optical sensors based on reflectometry are reflectometric interference spectroscopy (RIfS) [2] and ellipsometry [3,4], Evanescent field techniques, which are sensitive to changes in the refractive index, open a wide variety of optical detection principles [5] such as surface plasmon resonance spectroscopy (SPR) [6—8], Mach-Zehnder interferometer [9], Young interferometer [10], grating coupler [11] or resonant mirror [12] devices. All these optical... 

The Mossbauer transmission spectra were recorded in the constant acceleration mode with an Elscint Mossbauer drive unit and a model MFG 3A Elscint function generator, an MVT-3 linear velocity transducer and an MD-3 transducer driving unit, y-ray detection was done with a Reuter-Stokes Kv-CH4 proportional counter driven by an Ortec 401A/456 high voltage power supply. Voltage pulses were introduced into an Ortec 142 PC preamplifier and an Ortec 571 spectroscopy amplifier. Data were collected on a Tracor-Northern NS-701A multichannel analyzer. The data were later analyzed on an IBM 360/370 computer. 

X-ray powder diffraction experiments were performed on a Phillips x-ray diffractometer with a Diano interface as described earlier (15). Mossbauer spectroscopy studies were all done at 77K with a homebuilt spectrometer consisting of an Elscint transducer, a Canberra amplifier and multichannel analyzer, and a Nal Harshaw... 

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