Ultra high sensitive long period fiber grating based sensor for detection of adulterator in ethanol

TL;DR

This paper presents an ultra-sensitive, compact fiber grating sensor for detecting trace amounts of methanol and water in ethanol, outperforming existing methods in sensitivity and detection limits.

Contribution

The authors developed a highly sensitive, easy-to-fabricate long-period fiber grating sensor for adulterant detection in ethanol, surpassing conventional sensors in performance.

Findings

Achieved sensitivity of 696.34 pm/Vol.-% methanol

Detected minimum 1.5 x 10^-3 Vol.-% adulterants

Sensor is compact, accurate, and cost-effective

Abstract

An ultra-sensitive sensor based on long-period fiber graings (LPFGs) has been fabricated for the detection of methanol and water content in ethanol. Our sensor is very compact in size, highly accurate and easy to fabricate making it very useful than the conventional surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor, which is bulky and expensive. We show that our sensor is capable to achieve an ultra sensitivity of 696.34 pm/ Volume-percent methanol and 655.3 pm/ Volume-percent water in presence of methanol and water in ethanol respectively. Our sensor is capable of detecting minimum 1.5 x 10^-3 Volume-percent methanol and water in ethanol, which is far better than all the methods reported till now.