Chemometric approach to the calibration of light emitting diode based optical gas sensors using high-resolution transmission molecular absorption data

Modeling the propagation of light from LED sources is problematic since the emission covers a broad range of wavelengths and thus cannot be considered as monochromatic. Furthermore, the lack of directivity of such sources is also problematic. Both attributes are characteristic of LEDs. Here we propose a HITRAN (high-resolution transmission molecular absorption database) based chemometric approach that incorporates not-perfect-monochromaticity and spatial directivity of near-infrared (NIR) LED for absorbance calculations in 1–6% methane (CH₄) in air, considering CH₄ as a model absorbing gas. We employed the absorbance thus calculated using HITRAN to validate the experimentally measured absorbance of CH₄. The maximum error between the measured and calculated absorbance values were within 1%. The approach can be generalized as a chemometric calibration technique for measuring gases and gas mixtures that absorb emissions from polychromatic or not-perfect-monochromatic sources, provided the gas concentration, optical path length, as well as blank and attenuated emission spectra of the light source are incorporated into the proposed chemometric approach.