Design and Fabrication of a Mini Spectrometer

In this paper, a portable compact grating-based spectrometer is designed, modeled, and manufactured for applications in material sensing. Zemax OpticStudio is used to create a ray-trace simulation for the spectrometer, which provides the basis for image quality evaluation. The spectrometer is then assembled -aligning off-the-shelf grating, lenses, and a line Charge-Coupled-Device (CCD) detector camera, inside a 3D printed casing designed for this purpose. The spectrometer is tested using a fiber-connected laser-diode and an external Raman probe for Raman scattering detection of water due to its naturally weak Raman active modes. Experimental results on the detection of water are in excellent agreement with those from literature, hence benchmarking our instrument as a compact yet high- yielding Raman Spectrometer.