This paper reports on the development, and evaluation, of fiber optic hydrogen sensors based on fiber Bragg gratings (FBG) and an experimental measurement system for long term experiments of fiber optic gas sensors. Two types of palladium metal sensors were manufactured; sputter coated and modified palladium foil with 20 and 100 μm thickness. The responses (at 90 °C with both 1 and 5 % hydrogen) of the coated sensor, the 20 μm and 100 μm foil sensor was found to be 10, 160 and 80 pm respectively to 1 % hydrogen and 25, 480 and 225 pm respectively to 5% hydrogen.
We present a first demonstration of a novel multi-parameter fiber optic (FO) sensor concept based on gold nanoparticles (GNP) embedded in a stimuli-responsive hydrogel material. A hemispherical hydrogel immobilized on the optical fiber end-face forms a low-finesse Fabry-Perot (FP) interferometer. The GNPs exhibit local surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) that is sensitive towards the refractive index of the surrounding environment, while the stimuli-responsive hydrogel is sensitive towards specific chemical compounds. We evaluate the quality of the interferometric and LSPR signal as a function GNP concentration and of hydrogel swelling degree stimulated by ethanol solutions. The GNPs shows to have little influence on the visibility of the FP etalon, while LSPR of GNP shows to be sensitive towards the surface refractive index rather than bulk refractive index. This demonstration shows that the sensor concept has the potential to be used in applications such as an intravenous two-parametric real-time sensor for medical purpose.
We propose and demonstrate a distributed fiber sensor based on cascaded microfiber Fabry-Perot interferometers (MFPI) for simultaneous refractive index (SRI) and temperature measurement. By employing MFPI which is fabricated by taper-drawing the center of a uniform fiber Bragg grating (FBG) on standard fiber into a section of microfiber, dual parameters including SRI and temperature can be detected through demodulating the reflection spectrum of the MFPI. Further, wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) is applied to realize distributed dual-parameter fiber sensor by using cascaded MFPIs with different Bragg wavelengths. A prototype sensor system with 5 cascaded MFPIs is constructed to experimentally demonstrate the sensing performance.
Gas pressure sensor based on an antiresonant reflecting guidance mechanism in a hollow-core fiber (HCF) with an open microchannel is experimentally demonstrated. The microchannel is created on the ring cladding of the HCF by femtosecond laser to provide an air-core pressure equivalent to the external pressure. The HCF cladding functions as an antiresonant reflecting waveguide, which induces sharp periodic losses in its transmission spectrum. The proposed sensor is miniature, robust, and exhbits a high pressure sensitivity of 3.592 nm/MPa, a low temperature cross-sensitivity of 7.5 kPa/°C.
In this paper, we present a tilted fiber Bragg gratings (TFBG) based surface Plasmon resonance (SPR) labelfree sensors with boronic acid derivative (ABA-PBA) as receptor molecule to detect glycoprotein with high sensitivity and selectivity. Tilted fiber Bragg gratings (TFBG) as a near infrared wavelengths detecting element can be able to excite a number of cladding modes whose properties can be detected accurately by measuring the variation of transmitted spectra. A 10° TFBG coated by 50nm gold film was manufactured to stimulate surface plasmon resonance on the surface of the sensor. The sensor was loaded with boronic acid derivative as the recognition molecule which has been widely used in various areas for the recognition matrix of diol-containing biomolecules. The proposed TFBG-SPR sensors exhibit good selectivity and repeatability with the protein concentration sensitivity up to 2.867dB/(mg/ml) and the limit of detection was 2∗10−5g/ml.
