Improved mesostructure by incorporating surfactant on thin film to develop an advanced optical fiber pH sensor with a temperature cross sensitivity feature

Abstract

A new optical fiber pH sensor based on bromothymol blue (BTB) thin film with temperature cross-sensitivity has been proposed in this paper. The BTB thin film was prepared by depositing a thin layer of a solution containing tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS) and a BTB pH indicator in the presence of surfactants, namely cetyltrimethyl ammonium bromide (C19H42BrN, CTAB), by sol–gel technology on an unclad multimode fiber (MMF) surface. The number of layers and the deposition length of the thin film were varied, and the power transmission versus pH variation was studied. The concentration of the surfactant was increased to understand the effect of increasing porosity in the sol–gel matrix to achieve improved pH sensitivity. A straightforward way to utilize the temperature cross-sensitivity feature of the optical fiber pH-sensitive device has been introduced to develop a high sensitivity temperature sensor. A sensitivity of 79.96 nW pH−1 was obtained by a 20-layer thin-film coated sensor in the pH range of 3–12.