Development of polymer optical waveguide-type alcohol sensor

Junichi Nagata; Satoshi Honma; Masayuki Morisawa; Shinzo Muto

doi:10.1117/12.758025

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24 January 2008 Development of polymer optical waveguide-type alcohol sensor

Junichi Nagata; Satoshi Honma; Masayuki Morisawa; Shinzo Muto

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Proceedings Volume 6829, Advanced Materials and Devices for Sensing and Imaging III; 682920 (2008) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.758025
Event: Photonics Asia 2007, 2007, Beijing, China

Abstract

Recently, alcohols such as methanol and ethanol have a wide attention as important fuel in next generation. However, As is known, many alcohols have a toxic and explosive nature. To prevent accidents caused by alcohol, development of a safety and highly sensitive sensor is required strongly. In addition, it is desired to be simple and low-cost. So, in this paper, polymer waveguide-type optical alcohol sensors such as fiber-type and channel waveguide-type have been studied. In these sensor head, refractive index n₂ of cladding layer was set at slightly larger value than that of core (n₁). Therefore, in the state without alcohol, the sensor head operate as a leaky waveguide. On the other hand in the state with alcohol, cladding polymer causes swelling and its refractive index becomes lower than n₁ in core. Based on this principle, large change in output light intensity occurs and detection of alcohol concentration becomes possible even for vapor phase alcohol. In the experiment using a fiber-type sensor with a core size of 0.25 mm, detection of 1% methanol vapor could easily be obtained. Furthermore, using a channel waveguide-type sensor head with a core size of about 50μm×40μm, large increase in sensitivity was observed.

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Junichi Nagata, Satoshi Honma, Masayuki Morisawa, and Shinzo Muto "Development of polymer optical waveguide-type alcohol sensor", Proc. SPIE 6829, Advanced Materials and Devices for Sensing and Imaging III, 682920 (24 January 2008); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.758025

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