Characterization of POF for liquid level and concentration sensing applications

Measuring liquid level and solution concentration play an important role in commercial and technological applications. For years, polymer optical fibers (POFs) have been very attractive for industrial applications because of their unique characteristics. In this work, we created simple, low cost and efficient set-up for sensing liquid level and solution concentration using POFs. We have calculated the acceptance angle of the POF to be 30°from numerical aperture (NA) measurements (NA ≈ 0.500).Images of a single POF showed the presence of impurities within the fiber which can contribute to power loss of the transmitted light. Light leakage was also observed when the fiber was bent to a tight radius, i.e. beyond its minimum bend radius of 15 mm. The experimental results show that as liquid level increases, the output power decreases. Furthermore, when the liquid concentration was increased, its response showed a greater loss of optical power due to the light rays in the submerged region of the POF tend to be refracted out of the fiber instead of being totally internally reflected and transmitted when index of refraction of the surrounding liquid medium is increased.