TY - JOUR AU1 - Wu, Junfeng AU2 - Chen, Hanyu AU3 - Kang, Guohua AU4 - Li, Xu AB - 1. Introduction Characterized by high sensitivity, high resolution, and fast response, tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy (TDLAS) is extensively employed in industrial process gas analysis [1, 2], environmental monitoring [3, 4], and biomedical science [5–7]. TDLAS technology can be roughly divided into direct absorption spectroscopy (DAS) and wavelength modulation spectroscopy (WMS). In WMS, the output wavelength of laser diode is simultaneously modulated by a slowly varying scanning signal and a high frequency modulation signal. As the absorption signal is transferred to high frequency, away from the interference of low frequency noise, WMS obtain a higher signal-to-noise ratio and stronger robustness than DAS [8, 9]. In practical applications, WMS is widely used, and the second harmonic of the transmitted light intensity signal is of critical importance in the calibration of gas concentration [10, 11]. Conventionally, the second harmonic is obtained by lock-in amplifier. However, analog lock-in amplifier requires reference signal that in phase with the harmonic signal. Accordingly, complex phase shifting circuits is required, and high-precision multiplier is complicated in structure and difficult to design. Besides, electronic noise and DC shift may affect the precision of analog systems [10]. Digital lock-in amplifier also requires reference signal that generated according to the frequency and phase of harmonics. To obtain the complete harmonic signal, the most common methods are to manually adjust the reference signal phase [12] or use two orthogonal signals [13–16]. The latter method is less cumbersome and is widely used in practical measurement, but the reference signals are still essential. In this paper, a TDLAS second harmonic signal demodulation method based on double Hilbert transform (HT) is proposed. And the second harmonic of the TDLAS signal can be easily obtained without reference signal. The proposed method needs no information about TDLAS signal except modulation frequency to set the passband of the filter. 2. Methodology 2.1 Theory of TDLAS The theory of TDLAS will facilitate the derivation of the proposed method which will be presented in the next subsection. In WMS, the output wavelength of laser diode is simultaneously modulated by a slowly varying scanning signal and a high frequency modulation signal. The wavenumber of the light emitted by the diode laser can be expressed as (1) Where vc(t) is the center light wavenumber and it is modulated by a sawtooth. Δv is the modulation depth of the frequency modulation. The relationship between the transmitted light intensity after passing through the gas and the emitted light intensity is (2) Where α(v) is the absorbance; It and Io are the transmitted and emitted light intensity; P (in atm) is the total gas pressure; S(T) (in cm-2/atm) is the line strength at temperature of T (in K); ϕ(v) (in cm) is the line profile; C (in ppm) and L (in cm) are the concentration of gas and the length of light path, respectively; and Ak is the k-th order Fourier component of transmittance. The modulation of laser emission frequency is achieved by changing the injection current, which actually modulates the laser frequency and light intensity simultaneously, and this produce a gas independent background signal called residual amplitude modulation (RAM). And there is a phase delay between the frequency modulation and the intensity modulation [17–19]. The intensity of the light emitted by the diode laser can be expressed as: (3) Where is the average light intensity; i1 is the linear intensity modulation depth, and it is proportional to Δv; ϕ1 is the phase shift between frequency modulation and the intensity modulation. The nonlinearity of laser intensity modulation is considered negligible here. In conclusion, the transmitted light intensity contains many harmonic components and can be expressed as: (4) Where ; φk is the phase of k-th order harmonic; Hk denote the amplitude of k-th order harmonic component of the transmitted light intensity, which is a function of t. Since its frequency is much smaller than ω, and to simplify the expression, it is not written as Hk(t) here. As a result of RAM, there is a strong background signal in the signal H1 [17]. Generally, the magnitude of H1 is much larger than other high order harmonics, and the magnitude of Hk diminishes quickly as the order goes up. 2.2 Hilbert transform The Hilbert transform of the signal g(t), denoted as , is the convolution of g(t) with the signal 1/πt. That is: (5) Here are properties of the Hilbert transform that will be used later in the derivation. The orthogonality of Hilbert transform: after Hilbert transform, the amplitudes of the signal remain unchanged and the phases of the spectral components are shifted by -π/2. For example, the Hilbert transform of cos(t) is sin(t). Bedrosian theorem [20]: Consider two signals g(t) and h(t) with nonoverlapping spectral in the frequency domain, and the Fourier transform of g(t) and h(t), denoted as G(f) and H(f) satisfy the following conditions: When | f |>W, G(f) = 0; and | f |W, G(f) = 0; and | f |