Development of Photonic Crystal Fiber Based Gas/ Chemical Sensors

The development of highly-sensitive and miniaturized sensors that capable of real-time analytes detection is highly desirable. Nowadays, toxic or colorless gas detection, air pollution monitoring, harmful chemical, pressure, strain, humidity, and temperature sensors based on photonic crystal fiber (PCF) are increasing rapidly due to its compact structure, fast response and efficient light controlling capabilities. The propagating light through the PCF can be controlled by varying the structural parameters and core-cladding materials, as a result, evanescent field can be enhanced significantly which is the main component of the PCF based gas/chemical sensors. The aim of this chapter is to (1) describe the principle operation of PCF based gas/ chemical sensors, (2) discuss the important PCF properties for optical sensors, (3) extensively discuss the different types of microstructured optical fiber based gas/ chemical sensors, (4) study the effects of different core-cladding shapes, and fiber background materials on sensing performance, and (5) highlight the main challenges of PCF based gas/ chemical sensors and possible solutions

Multi-channel photonic crystal fiber based surface plasmon resonance sensor for multi-analyte sensing

© 2009-2012 IEEE. In this paper, we report a unique multi-channel Photonic Crystal Fibre (PCF) sensor based on Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) structure comprising of silver and gold doped plasmonic layers for multi-Analyte sensing applications. We deployed a Full Vectorial Finite Element Method (FV-FEM) to investigate the sensitivity performance of the proposed PCF sensor. The SPR sensor is fully optimised to ensure propagation features, such as confinement loss, resonance condition, resolution and sensitivity are investigated within various optimised design parameters. According to spectral sensitivity analyses, 2500 nm/RIU and 3083 nm/RIU with 4 × 10-5 RIU and 3.2 × 10-5 RIU resolutions are obtained for Channel 1 (Ch1) (x-polarized) and Channel 2 (Ch2) (y-polarized), respectively.Published versio