Enhanced Measurement of Paper Basis Weight Using Phase Shift in Terahertz Time-Domain Spectroscopy

THz time-domain spectroscopy has evolved as a noncontact, safe, and efficient technique for paper characterization. Our previous work adopted peak amplitude and delay time as features to determine paper basis weight using terahertz time-domain spectroscopy. However, peak amplitude and delay time tend to suffer from noises, resulting in degradation of accuracy and robustness. This paper proposes a noise-robust phase-shift based method to enhance measurements of paper basis weight. Based on Fresnel Formulae, the physical relationship between phase shift and paper basis weight is formulated theoretically neglecting multiple reflections in the case of normal incidence. The established formulation indicates that phase shift correlates linearly with paper basis weight intrinsically. Subsequently, paper sheets were stacked to fabricate the samples with different basis weights, and experimental results verified the developed mathematical formulation. Moreover, a comparison was made between phase shift, peak amplitude, and delay time with respect to linearity, accuracy, and noise robustness. The results show that phase shift is superior to the others.