In the area of reflectance spectroscopy, interference effects from films of unknown refractive index and thickness of cause ambiguities in substance-on-surface identification. This presents a problem not in the laboratory, but in the field, where the thickness of the film to be identified is not controlled, and nothing at all is known about the film to begin with. A complication is that any illuminating beam incident on the film is immediately converted into multiple reflected and refracted beams. An essential first step in identifying the substance is selecting a single dyad from the host of multiply refracted and reflected derivative beams and measuring their separation, not in a controlled laboratory environment, but in the uncontrolled, unforgiving field. This patent application presents a method to accomplish this.
As exemplified by one embodiment, this invention is a method of using a moveable variable-aperture apparatus and the lens and detector to select a chosen dyad from a multiplicity of parallel coherent, frequency-modulated light beams, and to measure their separation.
In the drawings, closely related figures have the same number but different alphabetic suffixes.
1Fixed gate of moveable, variable-aperture apparatus
2 Sliding gate of moveable, variable-aperture apparatus
3 Base of moveable, variable-aperture apparatus
4 First guide rail of moveable, variable-aperture apparatus
5 Second guide rail of moveable, variable-aperture apparatus
6 Converging lens
7 Detector, capable of determining the intensity and modulation parameters of incident light.
8 Incident beam of coherent, frequency-modulated light, first of a bundle of 3 parallel beams. The embedded arrow shows its direction.
9 Incident beam of coherent, frequency-modulated light, second of a bundle of 3 parallel beams. The embedded arrow shows its direction.
10 Incident beam of coherent, frequency-modulated light, third of a bundle of 3 parallel beams. The embedded arrow shows its direction.
To illustrate the method, an embodiment of the aperture apparatus and accessories that can be used for implementation is described. In the moveable variable-aperture apparatus of
The widths of the parallel coherent beams 8, 9 and 10 will be known from the optical system that produced them, but generally their separations are not necessarily known. For example, the beam separations could be unknown if beams 8, 9 and 10 resulted from multiple refractions and reflections of an original beam that was incident on a dielectric slab. Parallel coherent beams 8, 9 and 10 are all frequency-modulated.
The method of using the moveable variable-aperture apparatus and the lens and detector is as follows. The MVA apparatus is first opened so that its aperture is the known width of a single beam, then the apparatus is positioned so that the light which passes through the aperture is of maximum intensity and zero beat frequency, being a single beam (
The foregoing discussions can be summarised with the following algorithm.
Additional embodiments of the aperture apparatus and its accessories are possible. For instance, the converging lens 6 can be replaced by a converging mirror, with the detector 7 placed in front of the mirror rather than behind it.
From the foregoing description, a number of advantages of my method become evident:
Accordingly, the reader will see that the method described can easily select any chosen dyad of parallel beams from a multitude of frequency-modulated parallel beams and measure their separation in two ways.
This method is able to do its stated tasks in an uncontrolled, non-laboratory setting. This precise ability is crucial to measuring refractive index and thickness of dielectric films in the field. In turn, the field measurement of refractive index and film thickness are critical to the unambiguous identification of substances on surfaces by their diffuse infrared reflectance spectra.
Although the description above contains many specificities, these should not be construed as limiting the scope of the embodiments but as merely providing illustrations of some of several embodiments. For example, the converging lens can be replaced by a converging mirror, and the detector placed off-axis in front of the mirror rather than on-axis behind the lens. The scope of the embodiments should be determined by the appended claims and their legal equivalents, rather than by the examples given.
This application claims the benefit of provisional patent application number 62889557 filed Aug. 20, 2019, by the present inventor.
Number | Date | Country | |
---|---|---|---|
Parent | 16997248 | Aug 2020 | US |
Child | 18078916 | US |