Optofluidic gutter oil discrimination based on a hybrid-waveguide coupler in fibre

Abstract

Discriminating edible oils from gutter oils has significance in food safety, as illegal gutter oils cannot meet a variety of criteria such as the acid value, peroxide value and quality. To discriminate these illegal cooking oils, we propose an ultrasensitive optofluidic detection method based on a hybrid-waveguide coupler. Prior to the straight waveguide inscription in the cladding of the silica tube using a femtosecond laser, a section of coreless fibre is firstly spliced with the ST to supply a platform for the inscription of an S-band waveguide. Then a pair of microfluidic channels are ablated on the ST using the fs laser to enable liquid analytes to flow in and out of the air channel. In the transmission spectrum, a unique resonant loss dip can be observed, which is produced by coupling the light from the laser inscribed waveguide to the liquid core when the phase-matching condition is met. This hybrid-waveguide coupler with a simplified structure realizes dynamic optofluidic refractive index sensing with an ultrahigh sensitivity of −112 743 nm RIU⁻¹, a detection limit of 2.08 × 10⁻⁵ RIU and a refractive index detection range from 1.4591 to 1.4622. This novel method can be used for food safety detection, specifically, for the discrimination of gutter oils.