Intelligent Electrospun Thermochromic Composite Nanofibers for Temperature Measurements

Thermochromic nanofibers (NFs) have emerged as an important class of nanostructured materials and have found a broad range of technologic applications. Herein, an optical fiber temperature sensor composed of coating electrospun thermochromic NFs on the end-face of fiber is reported. A composite coating consisting of an aqueous dispersion of a thermochromic material (cobalt-doped zinc phosphate or also called cobalt-doped hopeite -CoHo), in polyglycerol dendrimer (PGD), was directly electrospun onto the end-face surface of multimode optical fiber for the fabrication of temperature optical fiber sensor. Morphological features and optical properties of the resulting electrospun CoHo:PGD NFs were assessed. The diameter of the electrospun CoHo:PGDNFs deposited on the end-face of optical fiber was 500 ± 14 nm. The spectroscopic absorption of the electrospun CoHo:PGDNFs at 630 nm is measured to determine their relationship with temperature. The results under variable temperature from 25 to 250 °C indicate good linearity and show the potential of using CoHo:PGDNFs sensing applications for control in industrial processes that require a steady or changing temperature. To extract the chromaticity profile of the CoHo:PGDNFs and their temperature dependence, a multilayer feed-forward artificial neural network (ANN) was used. ANN has been successfully employed to extract temperature information from the chromatic changes of CoHo:PGDNFs.