Optical fiber sensor based on a cholesteric liquid crystal film for mixed VOC sensing

This paper proposes a novel cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) film-based dual-probe fiber sensor to monitor volatile organic compound (VOC) gas. The sensor consists of a 2×2 multimode fiber coupler, in which the two output fiber ends are covered by two types of CLC films (CLCF) with different pitches. It can be observed that the reflection peak wavelengths of CLCs shift to the red side as the VOC gas concentration increases. The sensitivities of the two CLCFs are 8.435 nm·L/mmol and 14.867 nm·L/mmol to acetone, 14.586 nm·L/mmol and 29.303 nm·L/mmol to ethanol, respectively. In addition, the dependence of the peak wavelength shift of CLCF on the total concentration of the acetone and ethanol mixed gas at different mixing ratios is measured. The linear relationships between the peak shift of CLCFs, the total mixed gas concentration and acetone/ethanol ratio are calculated using the least-squares method. Therefore, this proposed dual-probe fiber optic sensor can distinguish the concentrations of acetone and ethanol in a mixed gas of acetone and ethanol.