Abstract
This study reports a method for humidity sensing based on a specialty microstructured optical fiber (MOF). A suspended tri-core MOF was fabricated using the stack and draw technique. A low finesse sensing head was prepared by depositing a chitosan polymer matrix within the holes of the MOF, forming a Fabry-Pérot interferometer as a sensing platform while the chitosan film acts as the sensing material. The use of the probe for real-time breath monitoring was also successfully demonstrated. The probe possessed a maximum sensitivity of 81.05 pm/(%RH) for 90–95%RH range while the linear region of the sensor ranged from 70–95%RH. The temperature cross correlation was also experimented, and a lower influence of external temperature was observed. The probe shows an ultrafast response during human breath monitoring with a rising time and recovery time of 80 ms and 70 ms, respectively.
Highlights
Humidity is an essential criteria that should be accounted for in industrial, agricultural applications as well as in human activities, for example, manufacturing and storage of electronic and computer components, food storage, air conditioning and in pharmaceutical industry[1,2,3,4,5,6]
The present study proposes a versatile relative humidity (RH) sensor based on a suspended-core microstructured optical fiber (MOF) utilizing a chitosan polymer as the receptor
RH sensing of the probe is based on the interaction of humidity with the hygroscopic chitosan polymer via water adsorption causing a change in refractive index as well as an increased volume of the chitosan polymer
Summary
Humidity is an essential criteria that should be accounted for in industrial, agricultural applications as well as in human activities, for example, manufacturing and storage of electronic and computer components, food storage, air conditioning and in pharmaceutical industry[1,2,3,4,5,6]. The detection of relative humidity (RH) using optical fiber as a sensing platform, including evanescent wave sensors[10,11], fiber Bragg gratings[12,13], modal interferometers[14,15] and Fabry-Perot (FP) interferometers[16,17] have been reported. The sensing mechanism of broadly used FBG based humidity sensors basically relies on the hygroscopic property of the fiber core as it changes its own refractive index. To realize these sensors, POFs (polymer optical fibers) fabricated using PMMA have been used in various studies[33]. The sensor has shown the possibility of breath monitoring with a response time of ~400 ms
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