Optical Fiber Optofluidic Bio‐Chemical Sensors: A Review

Abstract

Optofluidic, as an emerging technology that combines photons and microfluidics, has become a powerful, intelligent, and universal sensing platform in the field of bio-chemical sensing. Optical fiber optofluidic (OFOF), as a branch of optofluidic technology, has stimulated a host of remarkable achievements in the field of bio-chemical sensing due to its superiority of compact structure, immunity to electromagnetic interference, low sample consumption, high sensitivity, and real-time dynamic response. In this paper, an overview of OFOF bio-chemical sensors is presented. The OFOF system architectures are introduced and some advanced functional materials and coating technologies that can be utilized in the OFOF sensing platform to achieve high-performance biochemical sensing are summarized. Research progress and current status of OFOF bio-chemical sensors based on various sensing mechanisms are summarized and analyzed, with emphases on their sensing principles, sensing structures, sensing applications, advantages, and disadvantages. Lastly, the existing challenges and future development trends of OFOF biochemical sensors are briefly discussed.

Recent Development of Optofluidics for Imaging and Sensing Applications

“…Optical waveguides, such as fiber optics, can be assembled in chips to guide light emissions and light collections for a variety of on-chip optical measurements [7,28,33,43] or sensing applications [44,45]. The optical fiber can be used as a bare type (typically 250 µm in diameter) or used after removing the coat layer (typically 125 µm in diameter for multi-mode optical fiber).…”

Recent Advances in Biomedical Photonic Sensors: A Focus on Optical-Fibre-Based Sensing

“…Another possibility integrates optical elements (e.g., microlenses) into functionalized fibre tips whose combination provides multiple functionalities. Moreover, the combination of optical fibres with microfluidics [10] (optofluidics) and optomechanics [96] is also enabled by LOF technology. For a side-by-side comparison between LOF technology and lab-on-chip, the reader is referred to [95].…”

“…Inscribed microchannels could allow liquids to flow in and out of the fibre, expanding the ability to measure diverse parameters. For instance, microfluidics plus photonics (known as optofluidics [10]) could also be implemented in the fibre (making use of the cladding). Typically, FLICE is performed on silica fibres, whereas the inscription of microfluidic channels on polymer fibres has also been reported [100].…”

“…Recently, optical biosensors implementing biorecognition elements have enabled new functionalization and detection capabilities of the fibres. Furthermore, the potential of optical-fibre technology has been remarkably extended by combining optics and microfluidics (optofluidics [8,9]) using optical fibres, i.e., optical-fibre optofluidics [10,11]. Finally, another degree of flexibility (and diversity) on the design of optical-fibre sensors is imposed by the fibre type and its characteristics.…”

A microfluidic system for analysis of electrochemical processing using a highly sensitive optical fiber microcavity

“…In parallel to planar optical sensing solutions, also miniaturized, robust, portable, but most importantly highly sensitive approaches based on optical fibers have been proposed [13][14][15][16]. Such devices show several notable advantages over the planar ones.…”