Influence of External Acoustic Noise οn the Operation of an Open Photoacoustic Helmholtz Cell

One of the most important problems in the design of open photoacoustic cells is appropriate attenuation of the external acoustic noise, because in the case of weak photoacoustic signals even relatively low level of such an acoustic noise can severely limit sensitivity of the setup. It is important that the mentioned filtering is not limited to the frequencies close to the light modulation frequency, but performed in the possibly widest band width, because although it is usually considered that setup sensitivity depends directly on the parameters of the final narrowband filtering and/or synchronous detection, it should be noticed that it can be also seriously affected by saturation of the signal amplifiers being overdriven by the signal components resulting from the mentioned acoustic noise. The paper describes how influence of the external acoustic noise on the operation of an open photoacoustic Helmholtz cell depends on mechanical dimensions of the cell. The results show that appropriate selection of the dimensions results in noticeable improvement of the external acoustic noise attenuation.