Polymer Optical Fibers for Sensing

Sensing techniques based on optical fibers are used in numerous key fields. For example, optical fiber sensors are exploited in medical diagnostics, environmental monitoring, physical parameters detection, industrial applications, food safety, and security. In fact, optical fiber sensors are used for their numerous capabilities, as for example when in the detection fast, portable, low-cost, small size, and/or rugged sensor systems are needed. In general, the optical fiber for sensing applications can be a glass one, a specialty one, or a polymer one. Polymer optical fibers (POFs) are especially advantageous due to their excellent flexibility, easy manipulation, large diameter, resilience, and the fact that plastic is able to withstand smaller bend radii than glass. These POF sensors, intrinsic and extrinsic, combined with different kinds of receptors can be directly connected to an online platform by interface software, allowing storing, analyzing, and displaying the sensor's data, to realize low-cost biochemical sensors for several applications. In this work, two plasmonic POF sensors, one intrinsic and another one extrinsic, that can be used in biochemical applications are described.