Near Infrared (NIR) spectrometers are widely used in many fields to measure material content, such as moisture, fat and protein in grains, foodstuffs and pharmaceutical powders. These fields include applications where only highly miniaturized and robust NIR sensors can be used due to small usable space, weight requirements and/or hostile working environment. Handheld devices for material inspection, online process automation and automotive industry introduce requirements for size, robustness and cost, which is currently difficult to meet. In this paper we present an advanced spectral sensor based on a tunable Microelectromechanical (MEMS) Fabry-Perot Interferometer. The sensor is fibercoupled, weighs 125 grams and fits to an envelope of 25x55x55 mm³. Three types of sensors cover the wavelength ranges from 1.35-1.7 μm, 1.55-2.0 μm and 1.7-2.2 μm, utilizing only a single pixel extended InGaAs detector, avoiding the expensive linear array detectors. We describe the design, principle of operation and calibration methods together with the control schemes. Some environmental tests are described and their results and finally application measurement results are presented along with discussion and conclusions.

Date Published: 27 February 2015
PDF: 14 pages
Proc. SPIE 9375, MOEMS and Miniaturized Systems XIV, 93750F (27 February 2015);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9375:
MOEMS and Miniaturized Systems XIV
Wibool Piyawattanametha; Yong-Hwa Park, Editor(s)