A Novel Sensor Design to Sense Liquid Chemical Mixtures using Photonic Crystal Fiber to Achieve High Sensitivity and Low Confinement Losses

Abstract

Chemical sensing is an important issue in food, water, environment, biomedical, and pharmaceutical field. Conventional methods used in laboratory for sensing the chemical are costly, time consuming, and sometimes wastes significant amount of sample. Photonic Crystal Fiber (PCF) offers high compactness and design flexibility and it can be used as biosensor, chemical sensor, liquid sensor, temperature sensor, mechanical sensor, gas sensor, and so on. In this work, we designed PCF to sense different concentrations of different liquids by one PCF structure. We designed different structure for silica cladding hexagonal PCF to sense different concentrations of benzene-toluene and ethanol-water mixer. Core diameter, air hole diameter, and air hole diameter to lattice pitch ratio are varied to get the optimal result as well to explore the effect of core size, air hole size and the pitch on liquid chemical sensing. Performance of the chemical sensors was examined based on confinement loss and sensitivity. The performance of the sensor varied a lot and basically it depends not only on refractive index of the liquid but also on sensing wavelengths. Our designed sensor can provide comparatively high sensitivity and low confinement loss.