Publication Date
2014
Document Type
Thesis
Committee Members
Jason Deibel (Committee Member), Brent Foy (Committee Member), Ivan Medvedev (Advisor)
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Abstract
Terahertz spectroscopy, due to the high sensitivity and specificity that it affords, has been incorporated in many fields to aid in the chemical analysis of gases. One potential application is to detect bio-markers in human breath for early diagnosis. Our current aim of our research is to establish a relationship between several chemicals and the glucose levels from human exhaled breath. 20 chemical including Acetone, Carbon monoxide (CO), Methanol were studied. Volunteers' breath samples were processed through a pre-concentration system before being injected into the spectrometer. Initially, a commercial preconcentration system, Entech 7100A, was used. However, due to the limitations of Entech 7100A, a custom built pre-concentration system that incorporates a sorbent pack from Markes International Ltd. has been developed. The new preconcentration system and preliminary results on exhaled breath analysis are presented here.
Page Count
54
Department or Program
Department of Physics
Year Degree Awarded
2014
Copyright
Copyright 2014, some rights reserved. My ETD may be copied and distributed only for non-commercial purposes and may not be modified. All use must give me credit as the original author.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
