2015 International Conference on Industrial Informatics-Computing Technology, Intelligent Technology, Industrial Information
Integration
The Simulation and Analysis of Gas Detection System in Infrared Absorption
Spectrum Based on LabVIEW
Zhou Bin
School of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering
Wuhan University of Technology
Wuhan, China
e-mail: zhou_bin@whut.edu.cn
Wang Lei
School of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering
Wuhan University of Technology
AbstractThe paper introduces the theory of gas
concentration detection by infrared absorption spectrum and
the modeling method of gas detection simulation system based
on LabVIEW. On the basis of wavelength modulation
technology, the second harmonic curve of the absorption
spectrum is extracted by phase-locked algorithm and the
concentration of the target gas can be obtained. By changing
the parameters of the target gas concentration and modulation
coefficients, the variation of the absorption curves and the
second harmonic curves is acquired. It provides the reference
for the design of gas detection system in practice.
Keywordsinfrared absorption spectrum; simulation system;
the second harmonic wave; phase-locked amplifier; LabVIEW
I. INTRODUCTION
With the rapid development of industry and agriculture,
the higher requirements of explosive gases detection are put
forward in many occasions. Traditional methods of gas
concentration detection, such as thermal conductivity,
catalytic combustion and semiconductor sensing, have the
shortcomings of poor selectivity, low sensitivity and slow
response. They are easily interfered by the environment and
arent adapted to the current detection requirements. With
the rapid development of laser technology, gas detection
method which is based on TDLAS (Tunable Diode Laser
Absorption Spectroscopy) has the advantages of high
accuracy, good selectivity and free from the interference of
the background. So it represents the important direction of
development in the current.
II. DETECTION THEORY
The detection technology of Infrared is based on the gas
molecular absorption spectrum. When a beam of infrared
light with the specific wavelength penetrates the target gas,
the infrared radiation energy is absorbed by the target gas
and the infrared absorption spectrum is generated. The
mathematical description is the Beer-Lambert law which is
listed as follow.
I t = I 0 e ( v ) L (1)
I 0 is the incident intensity of the light which is
emitted from the laser . I t is the emission intensity of the
light which can be detected by the infrared detector. (v) is
978-1-4673-8312-7/15 $31.00 2015 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICIICII.2015.125
10.1109/.46
Wuhan, China
e-mail: wlei_lei@foxmail.com
Fang Pengcheng
Product Development Department
Wuhan Accuracy Technology Co.,ltd
Wuhan, China
e-mail: whacrs_fpc@163.com
the coefficient of spectral absorption. L is the length of
optical path. At the same time, (v) can also be expressed as
follow:
v = S (T ) g (v) PC (2)
P is the total pressure of the mixed gas and C is the
concentration of the target gas. S(T) is called the line
strength of characteristic spectrum. g (v) is defined as line
shape function.
Putting (2) into (1), the concentration formula of target
gas can be obtained as following:
C=
ln( I 0 / I t ) (3)
S (T ) g (v ) PL
III. THE MODEL OF THE DETECTION SYSTEM
A. Wavelength modulation spectroscopy technique
Because the absorption spectrum of the target gas is very
weak, the method of direct absorption is rarely adopted.
Spectrum modulation technology is widely used in practice.
It can effectively reduce the noise caused by the laser devices
and greatly enhance the signal-to-noise ratio. The most
typical way of the spectrum modulation technology is the
wavelength modulation spectroscopy (WMS).
The output wavelength characteristic of tunable diode
laser (TDL) is changed together with the injection current.
When the low frequency sawtooth current is injected to the
TDL, it can drive the output wavelength scanning around the
center wavelength of the laser. And the high frequency
sinusoidal current can realize the wavelength modulation
spectroscopy. If the low frequency sawtooth current is
superimposed by the high frequency sinusoidal current, the
mixed current which is input to the TDL, can drive the
output wavelength of the laser is tuned around the central
absorption line of the target gas. Then the phase-locked
amplifier is used to detect the harmonic signals of the target
gas and the concentration of the target gas can be deduced.
The simulation of the modulation current is shown in
figure 1 and the detection principle of WMS is described in
figure 2.

Figure 1. The simulation of the sawtooth-sine current

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 Figure 2. The detection principle of WMS
B. Mathematical model of the system the line width and can be shown as v c = P X B 2 ;  is
The frequency of the modulation current is .When it the broadening coefficient of collision.
is injected into the TDL, it will lead to the parameter According to (8) and (9), A2 ( v ) is shown as follow:
changes of incident light, such as frequency v and actual 2S(T )PCL
A2 (v) = I 0
incident intensity I '0 . But under the ideal conditions, it can vc (10)
be approximated that the actual incident intensity wont 2 (M +1 x2 ) M + M 2 + 4x2 + 4x M 2 + 4x2 M 4
[ ]
alter as the fluctuation of frequency v . m2 M 2 + 4x 2 m2
v = v0 + a sin t (4) a v v0
m= x= M = 1 - x 2 + m2
I '0 = I 0 (1 + sin t ) I 0 (5) vc vc
In the process of gas detection, I 2 f is the second
v0 is the center frequency of the gas absorption line.
harmonic signal extracted from the absorption intensity I t .
means the frequency of sinusoidal signal. a is the
modulation amplitude. is the coefficient of light intensity. I 2 f is usually selected to calculate the concentration of target
According to Fourier series, (1) can be expressed as gas.
follow: According to (6), when n is equal to 2,
I 2 f = A2 (v) cos(2 ) = A2 (v) cos(2t ) (11)
I t = An (v )cos(n ) (6)
n=0 Equation (11) means that the concentration of the target
1
gas is proportional to the amplitude of I 2 f . In fact, I 2 f is
An (v) =
I

0 exp[ g (v) S (T ) PCL] cos(n )d
(7) changing with the change of frequency . To accurately
2I 0

0
= exp[ g (v) S (T ) PCL ] cos(n )d obtain the testing result, the phase-locked amplifier can be
used to extract the peak of second harmonic signal. The
Where equals multiplied by time t . (v) is much schematic diagram is shown in figure 3.
less than 1, so (7) can be further converted as follow:
2I0
An (v) =
0
[1 g (v) S (T ) PCL] cos(n )d
(8)
2 I 0 S (T ) PCL
=

0
g (v) cos(n )d
g(v) is the function which is used to describe the shape of Figure 3. The schematic of phase-locked amplifier
the absorption lines. Typical functions include various types, The reference signal r (t ) which is transferred to
for example the Lorentz line and the Gaussian line. Usually phase-locked amplifier can be settled as:
the Lorentz line is selected because the gas pressure is close
to the standard atmospheric. The Lorentz line is defined as r (t ) = K cos(2t + 0 ) (12)
(9). 0 represents the initial phase.
 1 vc (9)
g (v ) = I 2 f is multiplied with the reference signal r (t ) then

2 (v v ) 2 + ( c ) 2
v
0
2 the synthesized waveform signal u p (t ) is gotten as follow:
Where v is the actual output frequency of the laser beam. v0
is the center frequency of the gas absorption line. vc is

169
 u p (t ) = r (t ) I 2 f = K cos(2t + 0 ) A2 (v) cos(2t )
(13)
1 1
= KA2 (v) cos(0 ) + KA2 (v) cos(4t + 0 )
2 2
Passing u p (t ) through to a low-pass filter, the output
signal u (t ) B3 is as follow:
1 software maintenance.
KA2 (v) cos(0 )
u p (t ) = (14)
2 modulations. It includes the light source modulation module,
Then by (11) and (14), I 2 f can be calculated. When the
injected current to the laser is around the center frequency
v 0 of the target gas spectral absorption line, I 2 f will acquire
the maximum of I 2f max at the position v 0 .
C. The noise of the system
Generally, there are three main noise sources in
detection system. They are respectively detector noise, laser
additional noise and deviation noise which is caused by the
r a nd o m r e s i d ua l a mp l i t ud e mo d ul a t i o n ( R A M ) .
Detector noise includes shot noise, thermal noise and
1/f noise. Because thermal noise and shot noise have white
noise spectrum characteristics, their influences can be
reduced by the way of filtering. 1/f noise is more noticeable
in low frequency and can be effectively restrained by
wavelength modulation technique. Laser additional noise
can be decreased obviously by choosing the appropriate
lasers. Deviation noise is brought by the modulation of light
intensity and mainly affect the symmetry of harmonics
sideband amplitude. It is difficult to eliminate the influence.
In this paper, the method of wavelength modulation is
adopted and the intensity of the laser is unchanged in theory.
So the deviation noise is very small and can be ignored.
Figure 4. The frame of the virtual system
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IV. THE SIMULATION OF THE DETECTION SYSTEM BASED
ON LABVIEW
LabVIEW is a graphical programming software platform
which is launched by National Instrument (NI) company. It
provides a lot of sub-VIs to choose. LabVIEW has special
graphics program and simple development interface. It can
shorten the development cycle and is convenient to further
The virtual system of target detection is made of three
the gas chamber and optical path module, data processing
and display module. Virtual system can display the chamber
absorption curve and second harmonic absorption curve. It
can not only display the gas absorption information and
calculate the gas concentration but also analyze the influence
of various parameters to concentration detection. The frame
of the virtual system is shown as figure 4:
V. THE SIMULATION AND ANALYSIS
The main initial parameters of setting contain the
incident intensity I 0 , length of optical path L, the
concentration of the target gas C and line width vc . I 0 is
equal to 100 candela and L is 15 meter long. The value of C
is 50% and vc is equal to 0.05.
The results of the simulation system are shown in figure
5 and figure 6. The horizontal coordinate represents the
scanning frequency by the form of wave number. The
longitudinal coordinate represents the value of simulation
results.In figure 5, it reflects the actual absorption of optical
chamber and displays the gas absorption curve which is
describe by white curve. In figure 6, it shows the second
harmonic wave of the emission output intensity which is
displayed by white curve.
 By changing the gas concentration, for example the
value of C is 25%, the absorption curve of target gas and the
second harmonic wave are shown respectively by red curve
in figure 5 and figure 6.
Figure 5. Absorption curve of different concentration
Figure 6. The second harmonic wave of different concentration
In figure 5, gas concentration is proportional to the
absorption peak curve. The white curve peak is the twice of
the red curve peak. When the gas concentration reduces to
half, the output intensity of laser beam will double and the
absorption degree of optical chamber will reduce to half of
the original value. In figure 6, gas concentration is
proportional to the second harmonic peak. When gas
concentration becomes 25%, the second harmonic peak is the
half height of the white curves peak.
Similarly the initial values of the other parameters
changing will also affect the gas absorption curve and second
harmonic wave. As it is shown in figure 7, the value of
modulation coefficient v c is separately chosen as 0.05 and
0.09. White curve and red curve are respectively the different
value. It means that the curve will become more stout when
line width increases in figure 7.
Figure 7. Absorption curve of the different v c
Figure 8. The second harmonic wave of different m
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In figure 8, it shows the difference of the second
harmonic wave resulting after changing the coefficient m.
Three different color curves are white curve, red curve and
green curve. They correspond to the different value of m.
With the value increasing of m, the second harmonic wave
will become wider and its amplitude will decrease. It means
that the second harmonic wave will become wide and its
amplitude will become smaller with the increasing of m.
Analyzing the relationship between the parameters value
and the curve fluctuation can provide the reference of system
design in practice.
VI. CONCLUSIONS
This paper focuses on the weak signal detection and
analysis of wavelength modulation method on the basis of
gas absorption spectrum principle. Based on LabVIEW, the
model of gas absorption is built and the simulation process is
fulfilled. By changing the system parameters, the
characteristics of the second harmonic signal are analyzed
under the condition of different concentrations and
modulation coefficients.
It indicates that the theoretical analysis and simulation
results are consistent. So it not only provides theoretical
support for the parameters selection in practical tests but also
provides the reference for the subsequent design in the
future.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This paper is successfully fulfilled in collaboration with
Wang lei who is my graduate. Thanks for Fang Pengcheng
senior engineer who gives me much suggestion and help
during the research process. And the project is supported by
the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central
Universities (WUT:2014-IV-102). It creates the conditions
for the deep research.
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Zhou Bin: Associate Professor of Wuhan University of
Technology
E_mail: zhou_bin@whut.edu.cn
Supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central
Universities (WUT:2014-IV-102)