Miniature Wide Spectral Band High Resolution Infrared Spectrometer Navy SBIR FY2005.1 Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2005.1 Topic No.: N05-072 Topic Title: Miniature Wide Spectral Band High Resolution Infrared Spectrometer Proposal No.: N051-072-0982 Firm: New Span Opto-Technology Inc. 9380 SW 72nd Street, B-180 Miami, Florida 33173-5460 Contact: Jame Yang Phone: (305) 321-5288 Web Site: www.new-span.com Abstract: Chemical and biological (CB) weapons attacks have been considered as a potential threat in military operations. Identification of CB unknowns is significant for contamination avoidance and casualty reduction. Besides benefiting to military application in chemical warfare, chemical detection and identification system will have many other commercial and civilian applications. Spectroscopy method working in infrared region is well established for chemicals identification. However, these laboratory-based instruments are very bulky, heavy weight and power consuming. For field application, it is desired to develop a light-weight portable device that provides enough spectral resolution to identify unknown chemicals by searching spectral libraries of known chemical compositions for comparison. To construct a compact spectrometer, current technologies are still based on bulky infrared spectrometers operated by notebook-type computers. Although these devices are much smaller than the established laboratory spectrometers, they are still not portable nor simple enough for wide spread implementation. New Span Opto-Technology Inc. proposes herein a portable infrared spectrometer with wide spectral band and high spectral resolution through a novel scheme design with several innovations. Phase I will study the feasibility of the proposed concept by system design and preliminary bench top demonstrations. Phase II will fabricate a prototype device and demonstrate field test. Benefits: The successful development of this proposed scheme will result in portable wide band infrared spectrometer for military applications, such as in-field chemical and biological agents identification, chemical cloud tracking, explosives monitoring. It will also benefit to civil applications, such as surface or soil contamination monitoring for industrial and environmental applications including engineering reactor cleaning, hazardous spill remediation, and land reclamation. The device could be used by commercial laboratories where space and simplicity of operation is of essence. Detection and identification of chemicals is an everyday problem in broad industry areas such as pharmaceutical, semiconductor, chemical, petroleum, and others. Return