Alcohol Sensor Based on Surface Plasmon Resonance of ZnO Nanoflowers/Au Structure.

Haowen Xu,Wanli Zhao,Panpan Zhu,Yutong Song,Tianming Zhao,Qi Wang,Tongyu Liu

doi:10.3390/ma15010189

Abstract

Alcohol detection plays a key role in food processing and monitoring. Therefore, we present a fast, high reproducibility and label-free characteristics alcohol photochemical sensor based on the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) effect. By growing ZnO nanoflowers on Au film, the SPR signal red-shifted in the visible region as the alcohol concentration increased. More interestingly, the sensitivity improved to 127 nm/%, which is attributed to the ZnO nanoflowers/Au structure. The goodness of the linear fit was more than 0.99 at a range from 0 vol% to 95 vol% which ensures detection resolution. Finally, a practical application for distinguishing five kinds of alcoholic drinks has been demonstrated. The excellent sensing characteristics also indicate the potential of the device for applications in the direction of food processing and monitoring, and the simple structure fabrication and economic environmental protection make it more attractive.

Highlights

Alcohol Sensor Based on SurfaceSurface plasmon resonance (SPR) occurs when a photon of incident light hits a metal surface [1,2,3,4]
Because of its good local field enhancement properties [5,6] and its ability to detect changes in refractive index (RI) through intermolecular interactions, surface plasmon resonance (SPR) is regarded as a universal detection technique with good prospects in many bio-detection and sensing applications which is low cost, high reproducibility and label-free characteristics [7,8,9,10,11,12,13]
Au film is commonly used for preparing SPR sensors due to the unusual optical properties, generating strong SPR signals at visible frequencies [14]

Summary

Introduction

Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) occurs when a photon of incident light hits a metal surface (typically a gold surface) [1,2,3,4]. The SPR sensors based on Au are generally limited by their lack of high selectivity. One of the solutions is to modify sensing materials on the surface of Au film. ZnO has been widely investigated as a kind of sensing material due to its excellent properties with rich oxygen vacancies and low preparation cost [15,16]. Modifying ZnO on the Au film can achieve a photochemical sensor for detecting alcohol concentration

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion