Methane Gas Sensor Based on Microstructured Highly Sensitive Hybrid Porous Core Photonic Crystal Fiber

Abstract

We have demonstrated and analyzed the methane gas sensor based on octagonal cladding and hexagonal hybrid porous core photonic crystal fiber (HPC-PCF) for gas detection purpose. The proposed design of HPC-PCF has been numerically investigated by COMSOL Multiphysics software through utilizing the full vectorial finite element method (FEM). The optical characteristics of HPC-PCF as well as confinement loss, relative sensitivity and refractive index, effective area, nonlinearity and numerical aperture are optimized properly by changing the geometrical parameters as well as air filling ratio, air hole diameter, pitch constant of cladding and porosity of the core. In this simulation work, we have achieved optimum relative sensitivity of 21.2%, and confinement loss of 0.000025 dB/m at 3 μm pitch, 0.7 air filling ratio of the cladding and 29% porosity of the core for 3.5 μm absorption wavelength of CH4 gas. This proposed design of HPC-PCF will keep exclusive contribution for detecting the CH4 gas accurately.