Simultaneous sensing of oxygen concentration and temperature utilizing rise and decay of the phosphorescence of Y2O3:Eu3+ in high-temperature environments

Abstract

Inorganic phosphorescence-based sensing technology provides the opportunity to obtain non-contact oxygen information in high-temperature environments. However, given the dual quenching effects of temperature and oxygen, the sensing of oxygen in high-temperature environments using inorganic phosphorescence usually requires constant temperature conditions or accurate temperature information as a reference. Herein, a simultaneous sensing technique of oxygen and temperature is proposed in this study to achieve accurate quantitative sensing of oxygen concentration in high-temperature environments. We clarified theoretically that the rise and decay behavior of phosphorescence will be affected by both oxygen concentration and temperature due to the effect of oxygen quenching and thermal quenching and verified that both the rise and decay constant of the phosphorescence were sensitive to oxygen and temperature when the temperature is over 450 °C. A binary equation model was then established to obtain the temperature and oxygen concentration information. The experimental results demonstrate that quantitative two-dimensional sensing of oxygen concentrations in high-temperature environments can be achieved using the current method with only UV light and a high-speed camera. The current study promises a simple, easy-to-operate, and low-cost oxygen sensing method, which provides a reference for the development of high-precision optical oxygen concentration sensing technology in high-temperature environments.