Temperature-independent fiber salinity sensor based on Fabry-Perot interference.

We present a novel fiber Fabry-Perot (FP) interference salinity sensor based on polyimide (PI) diaphragm. With an increase in water salinity, the PI diaphragm shrinks, and the PI diaphragm constriction causes the increase of the width of the air-gap, which causes the red shift of the interference fringes. We fabricated salinity sensor prototypes with different air-gap lengths and 20μm PI diaphragm. When salinity increases from 0mol/L to 5.47mol/L, the maximum sensitivity is 0.45nm/(mol/L). We verify that the sensitivity can be enhanced by reducing air-gap cavity length. We also choose appropriate air cavity length and PI diaphragm length to solve the cross-sensitivity between temperature and salinity. As a robust and ultra-compact salinity sensor, which is easy to be fabricated and need no alignment, this fiber interferometer can be applied for real-time salinity sensing applications.