Extrinsic Fiber-Optic Sensor for Detection of Saliva pH

Measurements of pH are important in industry, agriculture, medicine, etc. Two main principles, namely electrochemical and optical ones, have been employed in pH meters and sensors. This paper is aimed at the development of extrinsic fiber-optic sensors of saliva pH. Such sensors have already been used for monitoring pH changes caused by biological processes. In this paper, fiber-optic sensors consisted of inlet and outlet silica fibers transmitting light from a halogen lamp to a sample cell and then to a diode-array spectrometer. Two types of sample cells were used; namely a silica cell with a measurement path of 10 mm, and a special silica capillary cell with a hole diameter of 0.07 mm and measurement path up to 40 mm. This capillary, produced at the Institute, consists of a Bragg mirror applied onto the inner silica capillary wall. Both the sensors were calibrated by using Sorensen buffers with bromothymol blue and a commercial pH meter. The calibration curves were used for the determination of pH of saliva samples collected from one healthy person at different times. It has been found that the fiber-optic sensors provide us with lower pH values than the pH meter. This result can be explain by effects of saliva components on bromothymol blue spectra. By using a correlation line between pH values measured by the sensors and those from the pH meter the sensor reliability of about 0.3 pH units can be estimated.