Analysis of double exponential fluorescence decay behavior for optical temperature sensing

Algorithms based on Prony's method are proposed for the estimation of exponential time constants of a double exponential fluorescence-decay process. The performance of these algorithms is evaluated, using Monte Carlo simulations, the results of which are presented showing that the performance of Prony's method can be greatly improved with the selection of an optimized observation window width and a few algorithm-related parameters. The applications of these noniterative algorithms in real-time, quasidistributed temperature sensor systems are discussed where the material decay may not approximate to a single exponential, or multimaterial sensors are used with a single, simple pump source and a single detector. Applications to quasidistributed sensor systems are considered and, thus, experimental results are presented to justify the use of the algorithms in Prony's method in practical double exponential fluorescence decay sensor analysis. (C) 1997 American Institute of Physics.