DIGITAL-FILTERS FOR NOISE-REDUCTION IN OPTICAL KINETIC-EXPERIMENTS

Noise is a significant problem in high-sensitivity techniques such as chemical relaxation kinetics. It is important to separate the significant data-containing signals from the noise. The use of high-speed A/D converters makes it convenient to acquire and store signals in digitized form. Hence, software implementation of signal enhancement techniques is convenient and versatile. The theory, design, and use of recursive digital filters for recovering kinetic signals from experimental relaxation kinetic data are presented. The frequency approach is used to develop the theory and design of these filters. It is also demonstrated that these filters can be used effectively on data with signal-to-noise ratios of unity.