Miniature Raman spectrometer development

The development of techniques to rapidly identify samples ranging from, molecule and particle imaging to detection of high explosive materials, has surged in recent years. Due to this growing want, Raman spectroscopy gives a molecular fingerprint, with no sample preparation, and can be done remotely. These systems can be small, compact, lightweight, and with a user interface that allows for easy use and sample identification. Ocean Optics Inc. has developed several systems that would meet all these end user requirements. This talk will describe the development of different Ocean Optics Inc miniature Raman spectrometers. The spectrometer on a phone (SOAP) system was designed using commercial off the shelf (COTS) components, in a rapid product development cycle. The footprint of the system measures 40x40x14 mm (LxWxH) and was coupled directly to the cell phone detector camera optics. However, it gets roughly only ~40 cm^-1 resolution. The Accuman system is the largest (290x220X100 mm) of the three, but uses our QEPro spectrometer and get ~7-11 cm^-1 resolution. Finally, the HRS-30 measuring 165x85x40 mm is a combination of the other two systems. This system uses a modified EMBED spectrometer and gets ~7-12 cm^-1 resolution. Each of these units uses a peak matching algorithm that then correlates the results to the pre-loaded and customizable spectral libraries.