Miniature Wide Spectral Band High Resolution Infrared Spectrometer

Chemical and biological (CB) weapons attacks have been considered as a potential threat in military operations. Identification of CB unknowns is significant for contamination avoidance and casualty reduction. Besides benefiting to military application in chemical warfare, chemical detection and identification system will have many other commercial and civilian applications. Spectroscopy method working in infrared region is well established for chemicals identification. However, these laboratory-based instruments are very bulky, heavy weight and power consuming. For field application, it is desired to develop a light-weight portable device that provides enough spectral resolution to identify unknown chemicals by searching spectral libraries of known chemical compositions for comparison. To construct a compact spectrometer, current technologies are still based on bulky infrared spectrometers operated by notebook-type computers. Although these devices are much smaller than the established laboratory spectrometers, they are still not portable nor simple enough for wide spread implementation. New Span Opto-Technology Inc. proposes herein a portable infrared spectrometer with wide spectral band and high spectral resolution through a novel scheme design with several innovations. Phase I will study the feasibility of the proposed concept by system design and preliminary bench top demonstrations. Phase II will fabricate a prototype device and demonstrate field test.