Design and Simulation of Surface Plasmon Resonance Sensors for Environmental Monitoring

In this work a Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) sensor based on Photonic Crystal Fiber (PCF) infiltrated with water samples has been proposed. To accurate detection of the sample properties, gold is used as plasmonic material. The air holes of PCF has been infiltrated with water samples, the optical properties of these samples has been taken from samples collected from Al-Qadisiya and Wathba lab. (east Tigris, Wathba, and Al-Rasheed) water projects at Baghdad-Iraq. Finite Element Method (FEM) has been used to study the sensor performance and fiber properties. From the numerical investigation we get maximum sensitivity circa 164.3 nm/RIU in the sensing range of 1.33 (of STD water) to 1.3431 (of river sample). The proposed sensor could be developed to detect f various high refractive index (RI) chemicals like the heavy metals in water.