Microwave cavity spectrometer for process monitoring of ethylene oxide sterilization

Abstract

This article reports a novel and simple cavity spectrometer for process monitoring of ethylene oxide sterilization, in which the source frequency, cavity resonant frequency, and gas absorption center frequency are asynchronous with respect to each other, thus, enabling sophisticated signal enhancement techniques to be employed without the need to engage the Stark effect. The operation of the device is such that the source frequency sweeps across a given range (F1 to F2) which contains one of the absorption peaks of the analyte gas (gases) of interest while the cavity resonant frequency Fr is oscillated within the profile of the absorption peak. Signal enhancement is achieved by adding a relatively small magnitude/high-frequency ‘‘dither’’ signal to the source frequency sweep pattern. The salient information of the gas absorption due to the oscillation of the resonant frequency of the cavity is carried by the ‘‘dither’’ signal and amplified and extracted by a series of tuned amplifiers and demodulators. Although the device is still at the initial design stage, a working prototype has been constructed in order to test the feasibility of the novel asynchronous modulation technique. This was achieved by successfully demonstrating that the device operates in an expected manner to within a standard error of 8.3%. It is believed that this error largely results from mechanical components. The significance of this error is greatly reduced when the spectrometer is operated in a large signal scanning mode as is the case when we apply the ‘‘power saturation’’ technique to measure the concentration of ethylene oxide in the resonant cavity. This measurement showed that there is a good linear correlation between the output signal and the concentration of ethylene oxide gas (to within a standard error of 4%).