Pulse scope for particle counter
An airborne, gas, or liquid particle sensor with an on-board data acquisition system that can be used to capture detailed particle pulse information. The information can be used both for on-board analysis and reporting as well as off-line analysis and reporting.
1. A particle counter system comprising:
at least one particle sensor including at least one photo-amplifier, the at least one photo-amplifier includes an output; and
at least one peak-detector to determine a pulse height for the output of the at least one photo-amplifier; and
at least one threshold comparator to count particles for pulse heights above at least one of a set threshold and a configurable threshold;
at least one pulse data-logging channel that processes pulse height outputs of the at least one peak-detector,
wherein the pulse data-logging channel is used to log, at least, pulse height outputs from the at least one peak-detector.
2. The particle counter system of claim 1 , wherein data associated with the individual pulses is logged to a volatile memory.
3. The particle counter system of claim 1 , where data associated with the individual pulses is logged to a non-volatile memory.
4. The particle counter system of claim 1 , wherein the at least one threshold comparator used to determine a pulse width for pulses above a noise threshold, and wherein the pulse width is also logged by the data-logging channel recording the pulse height.
5. The particle counter system of claim 4 , where individual pulses are filtered by a trigger event before being logged.
6. The particle counter system of claim 5 , where the trigger event is pulse height.
7. The particle counter system of claim 5 , where the trigger event is pulse width.
8. The particle counter system of claim 5 , where the trigger event is a combination of pulse height and pulse width.
9. The particle counter system of claim 5 , where the trigger event is an external signal.
10. The particle counter system of claim 5 , where the trigger event is controlled by a different controller.
11. The particle counter system of claim 4 , where the logged data is subsequently used to reconstruct a pulse stream over time.