Sensors, Vol. 19, Pages 5502: Design and Performance of a Composite Grating-Coupled Surface Plasmon Resonance Trace Liquid Concentration Sensor (Sensors)

In this paper, a grating-coupled surface plasmon resonance concentration sensor employing a gold and indium tin oxide (Au/ITO) nanoparticle composite instead of metal is proposed. The structure and material parameters of the sensor are discussed and analyzed. Taking the ethylene glycol concentration as an example, the influence of the nanocomposite on the wave vector matching, the influence of the refractive index of the medium to be tested and the influence of the concentration on the refractive index were analyzed in detail. The experimental results show that when the sensor is used for the measurement of ethylene glycol concentration, the correlation coefficient between the concentration and the refractive index is as high as 0.999995. The fitting curve and data correlation are good, and the sensitivity has a good linear relationship with the sensitivity. Therefore, the sensor structure proposed in this paper can be used to accurately measure the trace concentration of liquid, and its sensing mode has certain reference value for the measurement of general trace fluid concentration.