Detection of Harmful Chemical Compounds in Plastics with Highly Sensitive Photonic Crystal Fiber with Higher Nonlinear Coefficient

Abstract

Dangers from various chemical compounds in polycarbonate plastics that are exposed to the human body are a matter of great apprehension nowadays. Research has been going on and many analytical and electrochemical analysis methods have been developed to detect these harmful compounds. But in most cases, these analyses are very time consuming, require certain laboratory settings, a lot of pre-preparation and overpriced equipment. For these, an optical analysis technique employing a dodecagonal photonic crystal fiber (PCF) structure having a floral pattern in the first cladding layer is considered in this work. Among the most detrimental chemical compounds of plastic, bisphenol A (BPA), bisphenol S (BPS) and di (2-ethylhexvl) phthalate (DEHP), these three are considered and sensitivity of these compounds are measured individually. As a result, the relative sensitivity of 94.9%, 97.6% and 94.9% respectively for BPA, BPS, and DEHP is obtained. It is to be mentioned that these concerned compounds are sensed by PCF for the first time to the best of our knowledge. Furthermore, confinement loss and nonlinearity are also analyzed for the same proposed structure altering the three compounds which also results in a satisfactory outcome showing low confinement loss and very high nonlinearity. Thus, the proposed dodecagonal floral structure can be employed in various applications including chemical and biochemical sensing, nonlinear optics, supercontinuum generation, and many others.