Demostración de un sensor de gas metano basado en un sistema de acoplo de múltiples secciones de fibra de cristal fotónico

Abstract

Hollow-core photonic bandgap fibres (HC-PBFs) have been recently demonstrated as a powerful technology in the field of gas sensing. The long interaction path lengths available with these fibers are advantageous for the detection of weakly absorbing gases such as methane. However, long path lengths also yield to very high insertion times of the gas into the fiber. In this paper, a novel solution based on a multicoupling gap system to detect methane with HC-PBFs is proposed. For that purpose, a conventional configuration using one long piece of HC-PBF is compared to this novel method, which uses shorter pieces of HC-PBF with the same overall length as the previous configuration. The results and conclusions from experimental studies are presented and discussed. The multicoupling gap system is demonstrated to considerably reduced the filling time while maintaining the sensitivity, proving the feasibility of the configuration proposed.