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Nevertheless, this system is not suitable for long-distance remote sensing due to the high loss atmospheric transmission at 7.5 µm. The QC laser was driven by a microsecond pulsed current and a precision of 2 ppm was obtained with a pulse-to-pulse normalization technique. In 2013, Chen et al., combined a Fabry-Perot quantum cascaded (QC) laser operating at 7.5 µm and a liquid nitrogen (LN) cooled HgCdTe mid-infrared detector to monitor the CH 4 concentration. To date, several optical methods have been developed to measure CH 4. Compared to the traditional sensors, optical sensors have the merits of high-precision, fast-response and durability in detecting the CH 4 concentration.
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Thus, it is important to monitor the ambient CH 4 concentration in some particular places such as natural gas pipelines. However, it can cause very dangerous asphyxia or even explosion when the CH 4 concentration in the air reaches a certain level. Methane (CH 4) is a kind of greenhouse gas, as well as the main component of natural gas, biogas, coal-mine gas, etc. © 2020 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement 1.
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The wavelength of Raman pulsed laser can be tuned from 1652.0 nm to 1654.0 nm continuously with an optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) of more than 35 dB. The peak power is estimated to be as high as about 30.85 W, and a 3-dB linewidth as narrow as less than 0.08 nm is achieved when the average power of 1541 nm pump is 3.1 W. The repetition-rate and the pulse-width of the 1653.7 nm pulsed laser are 100 kHz and 31 ns, respectively. A homemade high peak-power 1541 nm pulsed laser is employed to modulate and amplify a 1653.7 nm distributed feedback laser (DFB) seed synchronously in a segment of the 52-meter-long highly germania-doped fiber (HGDF). A 1541 nm laser seed is modulated into pulse trains, which will be used as the Raman pump laser, by driving a reflective semiconductor optical amplifier (RSOA) with a continuous periodic square-wave voltage.
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