Quantitative measurement of analyte gases in a microwave spectrometer using a dynamic sampling method

This article reports quantitative measurement of concentrations of water vapor (absorption line at 22.235 GHz) and ethylene oxide (absorption line at 23.123 GHz) in different gas mixtures by means of a microwave spectrometer. The problem of absorption line broadening and the gas memory problem inherent in the quantitative analysis of gases using microwave molecular rotational spectroscopy have been solved. The line broadening problem was minimized by gas dilution with nitrogen and the gas memory problem was effectively reduced by means of a dynamic sampling method. Calibration of ethylene oxide with a dilution factor of 5 has demonstrated that the standard deviations of the calibration data were less than 4.2%. A typical ethylene oxide sterilization production cycle was chosen to monitor chamber ethylene oxide concentrations in the gas dwell phase and the repeatability of these real time measurements was 2.7%.