Effect of heat treatments on the performance of polymer optical fiber sensor

Abstract

Although the numerous advantages of polymer optical fiber (POF) sensors have been applied in different fields, the measurement consistency and sensitivity of POF evanescent wave (EW) sensors are still affected by its thermal stability and water absorption. Therefore, we perform a study to demonstrate the mechanism of the effect of heat treatments on physical and optical properties of POF EW sensors. We investigate the surface morphology, composition, refractive index, geometry, and weight of the fiber-sensing region subjected to water and vacuum heat treatments. We examine the spectral transmission and transmitted light intensity of POF sensors. We present a theoretical investigation of the effect of heat treatments on the sensitivity of POF EW sensors. The performance of the prepared sensor is evaluated using glucose and Chlorella pyrenoidosa analytes. We discovered that the spectral transmission and transmitted light intensity of the fibers shows little effect of vacuum heat treatments. In particular, the sensors, which subject to vacuum heat treatment at 110 °C for 3 h, exhibit temperature-independent measuring consistency and high sensitivity in glucose solutions in the temperature range 15-60 °C and also show high sensitivity in Chlorella pyrenoidosa solutions.

Strain, temperature, moisture, and transverse force sensing using fused polymer optical fibers

“…With increasing temperature, the POF optical propagation loss increases, irrespective of the samples, but the temperature sensitivity of the fused POF was >20 times higher than the non-fused POF. The intensity variation obtained with the temperature increase is related to the thermo-optic effect, which is the POF refractive index variation with respect to the temperature, as characterized in [29]. Although the fused POFs did not exhibit a sharp decrease in the Young's modulus at temperature close to the glass-transition temperature, they showed larger variations of the Young's modulus at temperature of <60°C than those of the non-fused POFs [24].…”

Influence of the Cladding Structure in PMMA mPOFs Mechanical Properties for Strain Sensors Applications

“…For this reason, the employed mPOFs are cleaved with a razor blade perpendicular to the fiber at about 50°C. In some applications of POFBG sensors the POF need to be annealed, since the annealing can reduce the sensor hysteresis and provide higher sensitivity for certain type of sensors [14], [30], [31], all the samples were pre-annealed for 24 hours at 80°C.…”

Intensity-Modulated Polymer Optical Fiber-Based Refractive Index Sensor: A Review

“…While in the RI range of 1.41–1.47, the length of the sensing region was not a critical aspect to obtain the best resolution. Besides, Zhong et al [ 105 ] investigated the mechanism of the effect of heat treatments on physical and optical properties of D-shape POF-based EW sensors.…”