The Design And Analysis Of Plate Optical Waveguide Sensors

The rapid growth in waveguide fabrication and fine process technology leads to a great progress of optical plate waveguide in sensing areas as well as in optic communications. The applications of plate waveguide sensor in biochemistry, medical science, life science and environmental monitoring make it to be hotspot in plate waveguide field.Sol-gel coating technology has been chosen to fabricate the plate waveguides for our experiments. Then a sensor physical model for prism coupling plate waveguides is designed and fabricated based on aforementioned technology. A series of tests have also been done. The concrete work includes two parts as below.1. TiO₂ plate waveguides were fabricated on the glass substrates with excellent optical characters using sol-gel methods. The thickness and refractive index of the waveguide were measured based m-line theory and numerical calculation. The measured results provide the experiment parameters and the theoretical basis for plate waveguide sensor design.2. Based on the analysis of the waveguide optics theory, the plate waveguide sensors are designed and investigated. The ATR of pending measured liquid with different concentrations is utilized to test and analyze the whole system.The analysis results show that this type of optical sensors has higher resolution and sensitivity than traditional sensors, which provides theoretical basis and experimental references for the design of new type of sensors with high resolution and sensitivity.