Front-End Amplifiers for Tuning Forks in Quartz Enhanced PhotoAcoustic Spectroscopy
2020
Giansergio Menduni | Angelo Sampaolo | Pietro Patimisco | Marilena Giglio | Stefano Dello Russo | Andrea Zifarelli | Arianna Elefante | Piotr Z. Wieczorek | Tomasz Starecki | Vittorio M. N. Passaro | Frank K. Tittel | Vincenzo Spagnolo
A study of the front-end electronics for quartz tuning forks (QTFs) employed as optoacoustic transducers in quartz-enhanced photoacoustic spectroscopy (QEPAS) sensing is reported. Voltage amplifier-based electronics is proposed as an alternative to the transimpedance amplifier commonly employed in QEPAS experiments. The possibility to use differential input/output configurations with respect to a single-ended configuration has also been investigated. Four different architectures have been realized and tested: a single-ended transimpedance amplifier, a differential output transimpedance amplifier, a differential input voltage amplifier and a fully differential voltage amplifier. All of these amplifiers were implemented in a QEPAS sensor operating in the mid-IR spectral range. Water vapor in ambient air has been selected as the target gas species for the amplifiers’ testing and validation. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) measured for the different configurations has been used to compare the performances of the proposed architectures. We demonstrated that the fully differential voltage amplifier allows for a nearly doubled SNR with respect to the typically used single-ended transimpedance amplifier.
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