A spherical-structure based fiber sensor for simultaneous measurement of ammonia gas concentration and temperature

Abstract

A novel fiber sensor for simultaneous measurement of ammonia gas concentration and temperature is proposed. The sensor is fabricated from two sections of single-mode fiber which are cleaved and then a fusion splicer and which is then used to fabricate spherically shaped structures at the end facets. The fusion arc is used to soften the glass which naturally assumes a spherical shape due to surface tension. A short section of multimode fiber is then fusion spliced with the two spherical-shaped ends of the single mode fibers so both the core modes and the cladding modes of the multimode fiber are excited to create two kinds of interference dips: One is created by core modes only which is not sensitive to ammonia gas since the core is isolated by the cladding so the effective refractive index of the core does not change when the refractive index of the environment changes, The other dip is created by the coupling of the core mode and cladding mod, which with a suitable coating is sensitive to ammonia gas. Silica sol-gel was prepared and coated on the fiber surface as a sensing layer for detecting ammonia gas concentration. The experimental results show that the two dips have linear wavelength shift responses but with different sensitivities to ammonia gas concentration (5.03×10-4nm/ppm for dip1 and -2.5×10- 5nm/ppm for dip2) and temperature (0.0067 nm/oC for dip1 and 0.0149 nm/oC for dip2. By constructing a wavelength shifts matrix for the two dips vs. ammonia gas concentration and temperature, both the ammonia gas concentration and temperature can be measured simultaneously.