Investigation of a highly sensitive fiber-optic milk adulteration sensor by shining an airy beam

• Main Authors: Datta, Arijit, Saha, Ardhendu
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adulterants; Evanescent waves; Fiber optics; Formaldehyde; Gaussian beams (optics); Hydrogen peroxide; Nutrients; Optical measuring instruments; Refractivity; Sensitivity; Sensors; Transmission loss
• ISSN: 0094-243X; 1551-7616
• DOI: 10.1063/5.0142297

Milk has a high nutritional value since it includes a range of nutrients required for the human body’s regular growth and maintenance. Consumption of milk has increased dramatically in recent decades and it currently makes up a major chunk of the worldwide diet for a huge percentage of the people. Because of such growing demand, some deceitful producers are engaging in milk adulteration and this misconduct has become a prevalent concern, which lacks strong surveillance by food safety officials. Milk is frequently cheated (adulterated) for financial advantage and some common adulterants are formaldehyde, hydrogen peroxide, urea, water etc. The food sector is concerned about the speedy detection of such adulterants as they reduce the nutritious content of milk, putting customer’s health at risk. So, the purpose of this research is to come up with a new design of a very sensitive evanescent wave-based optical sensor to detect various milk adulterants such as formaldehyde and hydrogen peroxide. The sensing structure here is a decladded multimode fiber with an Airy beam shining on it. The detection process is based on the change in transmission loss when a decladded fiber comes into touch with adulterated milk sample. To anticipate accurate sensing, the amounts of adulterants in milk ranged from 0% to 14.28%, with refractive indices varying from 1.34550 to 1.34966 were considered. Moreover, an Eigenmode expansion (EME) study in Lumerical Mode solver has been exploited to corroborate the sensing property of the device, which is in agreement with our theoretical analysis. By considering the sensor length as5 cm, the proposed sensor responded with an admirable sensitivity of 0.05 dB/% (for formaldehyde detection) and 0.04 dB/% (for hydrogen peroxide detection), revealing a 16.66-fold and 20-fold higher sensitivity over the Gaussian-beam shined sensor. The results reveal that there is remarkable linearity between the adulteration level and transmission loss. Thus, the aforementioned principle provides a highly sensitive and simple-to-fabricate approach for detecting various milk adulterations, which might help to tackle severe problems in the food sector.