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Traditional instruments for spectral reflectance measurements consist of a broadband light source, a monochromator, a photodetector, a mechanical chopper, an analysing unit and a display. This equipment enables us to perform continuous reflectance spectrum measurements of an object. In many appearance measurement applications the reflectance at particular discrete wavelengths give adequate spectral information. Then the broadband light source and the monochromator can be replaced by narrow band light sources (e.g. a LED or a laser diode), which in industrial measurements have significant advantages: the possibility of electronic chopping, electrical and mechanical reliability and efficient connectability to optical fibres. With a view to the reguirements of industrial enviroments an eight channel spectrophotometer has been constructed. The equipment is composed of eight electronically chopped LED's, two photodiode detectors, a temperature controller, a fibre optic probe, a signal conditioning electronics, a microprocessor based controlling and analysing unit, a display and a plotter interface. The wavelengths of the semiconductor sources can be chosen from a commercial selection between 480 nm ... 1500 nm. The chopping of the channels is time multiplexed and the duration of one sampling sequence is 640 μs. Samples are taken syn-chronously from the emitted light pulses with the reference detector and from the light modulated by the object under test with the measurement detector. Before every light pulse, a "dark" sample is taken from the background irradiance to be reduced from the measurement signal. The microprocessor takes care of further signal processing, computation of the parameters and displaying of the results on the 8 x 4 digit display or on plotter curve. The influence of intensity variation of the emitters is eliminated by relative measurement and the consequences of temperature changes are minimized by stabilizing the temperature of the transmitters and receivers with a thermoelectric controller. The measuring end of the fibre optic probe is coaxial: The eight transmitting bundles from eight LEDs are bound together, randomly mixed and surrounded by the receiving bundle leading to the detector. A portion of each transmitting bundle goes to the reference detector for the measurement of the emitted light. The stability of the equipment and the measurement range for colour modulation detection are presented. The latter measurement is not dependent on the distance between the probe and the object. The colour measurement of different kinds of paper are presented as applications. Potential industrial applications could be, for example, the on-line colour measurement of paper on a paper machine or on a printing press and the in-line concentration measurements of various liquids at the same time.
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