The fiber ring laser intra-cavity gas sensor for C2H2 and CO2 detection based on photoacoustic spectroscopy

In this paper, a two-component gas sensing system in the resonant cavity of the fiber ring laser based on photoacoustic spectroscopy (PAS) is designed by embedding the PAS cell into the laser resonant cavity. A ring cavity erbium-doped fiber (EDF) laser is built in this system, combined with a longitudinal resonant PAS cell to detect the PAS signal, and a custom-designed wavelength modulator uses the fiber bragg grating (FBG) to paste the piezoelectric transducer (PZT) for scanning and modulating the gas absorption wavelength. The gas concentration is calculated by the second harmonic (2f) PAS signal. Based on time division multiplexing (TDM) technology, the acetylene (C2H2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) is detected respectively by the time-sharing operation of C-band and L-band EDFs for different wavelengths output. The time-sharing operation of the two wavelength laser is realized through optical switches, which effectively avoids the laser power loss and the instability of each wavelength caused by the mode competition phenomenon of multiple wavelengths. The detection performance of C2H2 and CO2 is implemented under normal temperature and pressure. The PAS signal intensity is further improved by optimizing the wavelength modulation amplitude and incident laser power. The linear fit (R2) and minimum detection limit (MDL) of C2H2 and CO2 are 0.99821, 728 ppbv, 0.9994 and 503 ppmv respectively. It shows that the two-component gas sensing system designed in this paper has a good linear response and high sensitivity, and plays an important role on the multi-component gas detection.