Design Simulation and Data Analysis of an Optical Spectrometer

Spectrometers have a wide range of applications ranging from optical to non-optical spectroscopy. The need for compact, portable, and user-friendly spectrometers has been the pivot of attention from small laboratories to the industrial scale. Here, the Czerny Turner configuration-based optical spectrometer simulation design is carried out using ZEMAX OpticStudio. A compact and low-cost optical spectrometer in the visible range has been developed by using diffraction grating as a dispersive element and USB-type WebCAM CCD (Charge-coupled device) as a detector instead of an expensive commercial diffraction grating and detector. Using National Instruments LabVIEW, data acquisition, processing, and displaying techniques are made possible. We have employed different virtual images in LabVIEW programs to collect the pixel-to-pixel information and wavelength-intensity information from the image captured using the WebCAM CCD. Finally, we have shown that the OpticStudio-based spectrometer and experimental measurements of the developed spectrometer are in good agreement.