Recent Progress and Applications of Thermal Lens Spectrometry and Photothermal Beam Deflection Techniques in Environmental Sensing.

This paper presents recent development and applications of thermal lens microscopy (TLM) and beam deflection spectrometry (BDS) for the analysis of water samples and sea ice. Coupling of TLM detection to a microfluidic system for flow injection analysis (µFIA) enables the detection of microcystin-LR in waters with a four samples/min throughput (in triplicate injections) and provides an LOD of 0.08 µg/L which is 12-times lower than the MCL for microcystin-LR in water. µFIA-TLM was also applied for the determination of total Fe and Fe(II) in 3 µL samples of synthetic cloudwater. The LODs were found to be 100 nM for Fe(II) and 70 nM for total Fe. The application of µFIA-TLM for the determination of ammonium in water resulted in an LOD of 2.3 µM for injection of a 5 µL sample and TLM detection in a 100 µm deep microfluidic channel. For the determination of iron species in sea ice, the BDS was coupled to a diffusive gradient in the thin film technique (DGT). The 2D distribution of Fe(II) and total Fe on DGT gels provided by the BDS (LOD of 50 nM) reflected the distribution of Fe species in sea ice put in contact with DGT gels.

A multi-thermal-lens approach to evaluation of multi-pass probe beam configuration in thermal lens spectrometry.

In this work, a recently proposed thermal lens instrument based on multi-pass probe beam concept is investigated and described as a multi-thermal-lens equivalent system. A simulation of the photothermal lens signal formation in a multi-thermal-lens equivalent configuration of the system is performed and validated by comparing the experimental signals of single, dual and ten-pass configurations to theoretically calculated values. The theoretically predicted enhancement of the signal is 9 to 10-fold for a weak thermal lens when comparing the ten-pass configuration with the conventional single-pass thermal lens system. Experimentally achieved signal enhancement in the ten-pass system is 8.3 for pure ethanol sample and between 8 and 9 for solutions with different concentrations of the Fe(II) - 1,10-Phenanthroline complex. Additionally, a value of 9.1 was calculated as the ratio of the slopes of the calibration lines obtained using the ten-pass and single-pass configurations. The achieved limit of detection for determination of Fe(II), in the ten-pass configuration, was 0.4 µgL-1, with a relative standard deviation around 4.5%, which compares favorably with previously reported results for TLS determination of Fe(II) in thin samples using low excitation power. For the multi-pass configuration the linear range of measurement is reduced when compared to the single-pass configuration. This is explained by the theoretical analysis of the photothermal signal under multi-pass condition, which shows the important contribution of nonlinear term in theoretical expression for the photothermal signal. The ten-pass configuration, which is presented and validated experimentally for the first time, offers important signal enhancement needed in recently developed TLS instruments with tunable, low power excitation sources.