Relative humidity sensor based on hollow core fiber filled with GQDs-PVA

A novel optic fiber Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) based on graphene quantum dots (GQDs) and Polyvinyl Alcohol (PVA) is first proposed for relative humidity (RH) sensing and experimentally demonstrated. The GQDs-PVA compounds are filled into the hollow core fiber (HCF), which is spliced at the end of a single mode fiber (SMF). The refractive index of GQDs-PVA compounds reduces and the length of the FP cavity elongates with the increase of RH, which will lead the reflective spectrum shift to length wavelength, and the variation can characterize the change of RH values. The humidity environment is generated by different saturated saline solution, and the RH values are calibrated by a moisture meter. Experiment results reveal that the wavelength shift shows good linearity with the RH changing from 13.47%RH to 81.34%RH, and the sensitivity is 117.25 pm/%RH with the linearity relevancy of 0.9983. In addition, reversibility and repeatability experiments are carried out and the mean square deviation of six sets of data is 1.425x10(-3), which indicates good practical development prospects. Taking the practical application into account, the influence of hydrogen and nitrogen in the air on the sensor is studied before humidity experiment, and the experiment results shows that hydrogen and nitrogen in the air have a negligible effect on the humidity sensor proposed in this paper.