Variety may be the spice of life, but variability is not – particularly for OEM instrument developers who must guarantee an answer based on the quality of a Raman spectrum. These answers matter, to their customers and to those affected by the decisions made based upon those outputs. A good-quality OEM spectrometer should, by design, exhibit low unit-to-unit variability from the start, and any remaining small differences should be corrected in order to achieve the most robust and repeatable analytical outcomes in the field. In this Tech Note, we demonstrate a method to correct for slight variations in the wavenumber and intensity response of multiple units, achieving better than 99.5% agreement between any two spectrometers across seven Raman spectrometers of the same model and configuration.
Application-specific instruments based on Raman designed by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are required to deliver consistent answers, day in and day out, regardless of the serial number of the unit or where in the world it is being used. While method development, sample handling, and algorithm development are essential groundwork to achieve this, Raman applications also depend on a high degree of unit-to-unit reproducibility of the instrument itself.
So how can you ensure that the same spectrum is collected from many instruments when each unit is individually aligned and optimized? With many optical, mechanical, and electronic parts in every instrument, there will always be some unavoidable differences in their spectral response when built in volumes of 10, 100, or 100,000 – no matter how exacting the quality control or how carefully aligned.
>> Download the Full Application Note as a PDF
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