Optical Design and Verification of Multipass Cell With Two Spherical Mirrors Using Space Equation Method

Multipass cell (MPC), with a long effective optical path length (OPL), is an effective method to improve measurement sensitivity in laser absorption spectroscopy for trace gas sensing. We present a space equation (SE) method to design MPC, which can solve inaccuracy caused by using paraxial-matrix (PM) method. The location and dimension of light spot pattern can be calculated accurately and intuitively through SE method. Meanwhile, actual effective OPL can be accurately calculated, SE method can reduce the interference effect, the direction of each ray can be obtained accurately, and, hence, designing the angle of outgoing ray is simple. By adjusting the mirror curvature, mirror space, incident angle, and incident position, we realized four dense spot patterns with different multiple reflections in MATLAB simulation. We calculated the shape changes of light spot after multiple reflection and its influence on the design of outgoing ray hole size accurately. We also considered the evolution of dense pattern and found a method easy to obtain multiple ring pattern. We verified the validity of the proposed model and built a compact MPC with seven rings dense spot pattern. Such MPC offers an effective OPL of 36.48 m with 198 times of reflection. We verified the tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy (TDLAS) technology to measure 610-ppmv standard methane. In contrast to PM method, the improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 1.36 times is achieved when the volume of MPC is reduced by 3 times. In addition, the SNR can be improved to 6.6 times, while the volume of MPC is the same. Results validated the ability of the SE method to design MPC.