A photon counting dynamic digital lock-in amplifier for background suppression in glow discharge atomic emission spectrometry


Gokmen A., Ulgen A., Yalcin S.

SPECTROCHIMICA ACTA PART B-ATOMIC SPECTROSCOPY, vol.51, no.1, pp.97-108, 1996 (SCI-Expanded) identifier identifier

Abstract

A photon counting dynamic digital lock-in amplifier, (PC-DDLIA), has been developed for the suppression of Ar lines in glow discharge lamp atomic emission spectrometry, (GDL-AES). The experimental set-up consists of a Grimm-type GDL, a prism-type scanning monochromator, photon counting electronics, an Apple Ile computer with an interface card and a computer controllable high voltage power supply. The photon counting electronics are designed to convert the photon pulses to logic pulses. A discriminator is used to reject pulses below a threshold level. The high voltage power supply is modulated with a square waveform generated from DAC and photon pulses are counted synchronously by the timer/counter chip, versatile interface adaptor (VIA-6522) on the interface card of computer. The data are analyzed in two steps. In the ''learn mode'', the GDL is modulated with a square waveform between 370 and 670 V and two spectra consisting of only Ar lines are obtained in a spectral window between 287.1 and 290.0 nm. A new modulation waveform is computed from these spectra which yields two overlapped spectra when the PC-DDLIA is scanned over the same spectral window. In the ''analysis mode'' of data acquisition, a target material with the analyte element(s) in it is used and the spectrometer is scanned with a dynamically varying rectangular waveform over the same spectral window. The net spectrum consists of pure atomic lines free from any Ar lines. The detection limit for the determination of Si (288.2 nm) in the presence of interfering hr lines (288.1 and 288.4 nm) is found to be 0.083%, whereas suppression of Ar lines over the same spectral window lowers the detection limit to 0.013%.