Abstract
Ethanol is a highly combustible chemical universally designed for biomedical applications. In this paper, optical sensing performance of tapered multimode fiber tip coated with carbon nanotube (CNT) thin film towards aqueous ethanol with different concentrations is investigated. The tapered optical multimode fiber tip is coated with CNT using drop-casting technique and is annealed at 70 °C to enhance the binding of the nanomaterial to the silica fiber tip. The optical fiber tip and the CNT sensing layer are micro-characterized using FESEM and Raman spectroscopy techniques. When the developed sensor was exposed to different concentrations of ethanol (5% to 80%), the sensor reflectance reduced proportionally. The developed sensors showed high sensitivity, repeatability and fast responses (<55 s) towards ethanol.
Highlights
Carbon nanotubes (CNT) have attracted considerable attention the last decade since its discovery in1991 [1,2,3,4,5], due to their unique structure and properties
The tapered optical multi-mode fiber (MMF) tip coated with carbon nanotube (CNT) thin film is connected to a multi-mode coupler
The inset shows the tip of the tapered optical MMF after cleaving
Summary
Carbon nanotubes (CNT) have attracted considerable attention the last decade since its discovery in1991 [1,2,3,4,5], due to their unique structure and properties. CNT has many features such as high mechanical strength and chemical stability as well as good optical and electrical properties [1,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. There are several interesting works reporting on optical fiber based chemical sensors. Zheng et al [14] reported a nano-film coated photonic crystal fiber (PCF) long-period grating (LPG). They had fabricated two types of sensors coated with interior and exterior nano-films. Their work showed that the sensors coated with interior nano-films have high resonance wavelength shift of 0.0007%/pm and provide a good platform for moisture detection [14]
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