Headspace Oxygen Concentration Measurement for Pharmaceutical Glass Bottles in Open-Path Optical Environment Using TDLAS/WMS

Abstract

Accurate measurement of oxygen concentration for pharmaceutical glass bottles is of great significance to ensure the asepsis of medicine and stability of ingredients. With merits of high sensitivity, low cost, noncontact, and real-time response, the wavelength-modulation-based tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy (TDLAS/WMS) technology shows great potential to achieve in-site oxygen concentration detection by the single-line spectrum measurement. This article focuses on headspace oxygen concentration measurement in the open-path optical environment, which is extremely challenging due to the short light path length and random ambient noises. First, a signal reconstruction method is established based on the discrete wavelet packet transform (DWPT), where random noise suppression is implicitly achieved. Then, oxygen concentration is inversed among the data between two adjacent valley values of the demodulated second-harmonic signal by multiple linear regression (MLR), and the linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is imported to enhance the information sparsity of second-harmonic signal matrix and to address the multicollinearity problem. Simulation results prove that our proposed method achieved considerable detection accuracy with the average absolute error of 0.05%. This article also designed a TDLAS/WMS prototype, and the experimental results aiming at glass bottles with different oxygen concentration of 0%, 5%, 10%, and 21% in open-path optical environment indicate our method has achieved an encouraging average absolute error of 0.54% and can survive well when the normalized signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is within 0.85–1. These results promise that the proposed methodology can be widely applied in in-site automatic optic inspection (AOI) instrumentation of headspace oxygen concentration measurement for glass vials.