Infrared Light Absorbance: a New Method for Temperature Compensation in Nondispersive Infrared CO2 Gas Sensor

Nondispersive infrared CO2 gas sensor was developed after the simulation of optical cavity structure and assembling the optical components: IR source, concave reflectors, Fresnel lens, a hollow disk, and IR detectors. By placing a hollow disk in front of reference IR detector, the output voltages are almost constant value, near to 70.2 mV. The absorbance of IR light, Fa, shows the second order of polynomial according to ambient temperatures at 1,500 ppm. The differential output voltages and the absorbance of IR light give a higher accuracy in estimations of CO2 concentrations with less than ± 1.5 % errors. After implementing the parameters that are dependent upon the ambient temperatures in microcontroller unit (MCU), the measured CO2 concentrations show high accuracies (less than ± 1.0 %) from 281 K to 308 K and the time constant of developed sensor is about 58 sec at 301 K. Even though the estimation errors are relatively high at low concentration, the developed sensor is competitive to the commercial product with a high accuracy and the stability.