A Simple but Effective Device to Avoid Objective Lens Overheating: An Air Blower Device

Abstract

The interior of the Earth is a high temperature and high pressure environment. High temperatures cause important changes in the physical and chemical properties of minerals. An increase in temperature leads to significant changes in the molecular and lattice vibrations, elasticity, and seismic velocity of minerals. The high temperature vibrational spectroscopy (infrared and Raman) used to study these changes can provide highly significant understanding of the Earth’s interior. During high temperature spectroscopy, the heating device that is used to heat the sample can work at a very high temperature (e.g., 1 500 ℃) because it has a cooling device surrounding it that is used to prevent the temperature of its environments from getting too high. However, radiation from its heating elements is intense and this will shine on and heat the objective lens of the focusing system for the spectroscopic light source, and this would result in damage to the lens. Thus, to avoid damage to the objective lens, an upper limit is placed on the heater temperature. The significance of this work is that it presents a method to exceed the present instrument’s temperature limit so that we can perform in situ spectroscopy on samples at higher temperatures. This work extended the temperature limit for the sample to a higher temperature by using an air blower around the objective lens to create a gas flow around it. The gas flow serves to remove heat from the objective lens by forced convection and its turbulent flow also served to increase the rate of heat transport from the lens to the moving gas stream, which together prevented overheating of the objective lens. Our results have shown that although this device is simple, it was highly effective: for a sample temperature of 1 000 ℃, the objective lens temperature was reduced from ～235 to ～68 ℃. Using this device, we performed in situ high temperature Raman spectroscopy of forsterite up to a sample temperature of 1 300 ℃. The results agreed well with previous studies and demonstrated that with our simple air blower device, we can perform in situ high temperature spectroscopy up to 1 300 ℃ without damaging the objective lens and without expensive components like a high temperature composite objective lens or a long focus objective lens.