Optical Fiber pH and Dissolved Oxygen Sensors for Bioreactor Monitoring: A Review

In the bioprocessing industry, real-time monitoring of bioreactors is essential to ensuring product quality and process efficiency. Conventional monitoring methods can satisfy some needs but suffer from calibration drift, limited spatial coverage, and incompatibility with harsh or miniaturized environments. Optical fiber sensors, with their high sensitivity, remote monitoring capability, compact size, and multiplexing, have become a promising technology for in situ bioreactor monitoring. This review summarizes recent progress in optical fiber sensors for key bioreactor parameters, with an emphasis on pH and dissolved oxygen (DO), and briefly covers temperature and pressure monitoring. Different sensing mechanisms, materials, and fiber architectures are compared in terms of sensitivity, response time, stability, and integration strategies in laboratory and industrial-scale bioreactors. Finally, current challenges and future trends are discussed, including multi-parameter sensing, long-term reliability, and the integration of optical fiber sensors with process analytical technology and data-driven control for intelligent bioprocessing.