Nematic liquid crystal filled D-shaped voltage sensor with enhanced performance for power monitoring and fault detection in extreme environments

Abstract

A nematic liquid crystal voltage sensor with enhanced performance is proposed in this paper. The sensor is designed D-shaped using a single NLC filled core without the presence of air holes, which has made the sensor fabrication much simpler than previous sensors. The sensor also consists of a circular slot that provides a vast space for the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) phenomenon with a minimum amount of gold. The performance of the proposed sensor is carried out using a finite element method (FEM) based simulation. Following this, the sensor obtains a maximum wavelength sensitivity of 10 nm/V for a wide range of 190 V to 250 V with 5 V increments. The sensor also has a linearity of 0.9926 and a figure of merit (FOM) of 0.2V−1. It has a resolution of 0.01 V. The proposed sensor is a promising technology with a wide range of extreme and sophisticated applications. The sensor’s simple structure, high sensitivity, resolution, linearity, and FOM make it perfectly suitable for a variety of sensing applications, including power monitoring, fault detection, medical diagnosis, voltage lines, electronics, etc.