A New Type of Photochemistry Instrumentation Based on Multi-sensor and Multi-spectrum

Up to now, the main obstacle in developing photochemistry instrumentation is the lack of satisfactory sensitivity and selectivity of chemical sensor. Many efforts have been made to solve this problem, for instance, by composing sensing array with different materials and data treatment algorithm based on artificial neural networks. These efforts, however, are quite limited due to the fact that the excitation signal on single or fixed frequency is not suitable for the sensors with different optical characteristics. In this paper, a new type of photochemistry instrumentation based on multi-sensor and multi-spectrum is proposed. The multi-sensor is composed of sensor array made by non-selective sensing materials and excited by a continuous spectrum. As the continuous spectrum covers a relatively wide frequency scope, the sensor array can describe different optical characteristics and create abundant sensing information. The adaptive sampling procedure of the spectrum and data processing algorithms is also given for the universal pattern recognition. Experimental results show that the proposed system not only works well on-line but also reduces the requirement of sensitivity and selectivity of the sensor. Therefore, the proposed system is helpful for the practical realization of photochemistry instrumentation.