Simply Fabricated Inexpensive Dual-Polymer-Coated Fabry-Perot Interferometer-Based Temperature Sensors with High Sensitivity

Abstract

We designed simply fabricated, highly sensitive, and cost-effective dual-polymer-coated Fabry–Perot interferometer (DFPI)-based temperature sensors by employing thermosensitive polymers and non-thermosensitive polymers, as well as different two successive dip-coating techniques (stepwise dip coating and polymer mixture coating). Seven sensors were fabricated using different polymer combinations for performance optimization. The experiments demonstrated that the stepwise dip-coated dual thermosensitive polymer sensors exhibited the highest sensitivity (2142.5 pm◦ C−1 for poly(methyl methacrylate)-polycarbonate (PMMA_PC) and 785.5 pm◦ C−1 for poly(methyl methacrylate)-polystyrene (PMMA_PS)). Conversely, the polymer-mixture-coated sensors yielded low sensitivities (339.5 pm◦ C−1 for the poly(methyl methacrylate)-polycarbonate mixture (PMMA_PC mixture) and 233.5 pm◦ C−1 for the poly(methyl methacrylate)-polystyrene mixture (PMMA_PS mixture). Thus, the coating method, polymer selection, and thin air-bubble-free coating are crucial for high-sensitivity DFPI-based sensors. Furthermore, the DFPI-based sensors yielded stable readouts, based on three measurements. Our comprehensive results confirm the effectiveness, reproducibility, stability, fast response, feasibility, and accuracy of temperature measurements using the proposed sensors. The excellent performance and simplicity of our proposed sensors are promising for biomedical, biochemical, and physical applications. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.