High-speed and high-sensitivity multi-gas detection based on parallel heterodyne LITES sensor

Abstract A parallel heterodyne light-induced thermoelastic spectroscopy (PH-LITES) sensor is proposed for high-speed and high-sensitivity multi-gas detection for the first time. Within the collaborative signal enhancement architecture (CSEA), high sensitivity and high-speed detection are achieved at the physical layer. A self-designed cylindrical multi-pass cell (MPC) with a recorded high optical path length to volume ratio (OPL/V = 37.4 cm –2 ) and a four‑tine quartz tuning fork (QTF) with a low resonant frequency ( f 0 = ~7.9 kHz) work synergistically to enhance detection responsivity, establishing a robust foundation for highly sensitive detection of low-concentration gas mixtures. High‑speed capability is enabled by parallel heterodyne modulation, where a single QTF is excited to generate a composite transient response signal, allowing for the rapid, simultaneous acquisition of spectral information from multiple gases. At the information layer, intelligent processing is implemented via a collaborative intelligent processing architecture (CIPA) integrating convolutional neural networks (CNN), a hybrid attention mechanism (HAM), and bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM). The CNN-HAM-BiLSTM architecture performs feature extraction, attention-based enhancement, and temporal modeling to enable accurate concentration retrieval from the parallel spectra derived from a single QTF output. Experimental validation using methane (CH 4 ) and acetylene (C 2 H 2 ) achieved minimum detection limits (MDLs) of 378 ppb and 285 ppb, respectively, within a 4 s scanning time. The proposed system offers an efficient solution for applications requiring rapid and sensitive multi-gas detection.