Reversible Sensing Technologies Using Upcycled TPEE: Crafting pH and Light Responsive Materials towards Sustainable Monitoring.

Multiresponsive materials with reversible and durable characteristics are indispensable because of their promising applications in environmental change detections. To fabricate multiresponsive materials in mass production, however, complex reactions and impractical situations are often involved. Herein, a dual responsive (light and pH) spiropyran-based smart sensor fabricated by a simple layer-by-layer (LbL) assembly process from upcycled thermoplastic polyester elastomer (TPEE) materials derived from recycled polyethylene terephthalate (r-PET) is proposed. Positively charged chitosan solutions and negatively charged merocyanine-COOH (MC-COOH) solutions are employed in the LbL assembly technique, forming the chitosan-spiropyran deposited TPEE (TPEE-CH-SP) film. Upon UV irradiation, the spiropyran-COOH (SP-COOH) molecules on the TPEE-CH-SP film undergo the ring-opening isomerization, along with an apparent color change from colorless to purple, to transform into the MC-COOH molecules. By further exposing the TPEE-CH-MC film to hydrogen chloride (HCl) and nitric acid (HNO3 ) vapors, the MC-COOH molecules can be transformed into protonated merocyanine-COOH (MCH-COOH) with the simultaneous color change from purple to yellow.

Plasmonic wavelength demultiplexer with a ring resonator using high-order resonant modes.

In this paper, we propose a novel wavelength demultiplexer based on metal-insulator-metal plasmonic waveguides with a nanoscale ring resonator. Its transmission characteristics are numerically studied using finite element method (FEM) simulations, and the eigenwavelengths of the ring resonator are theoretically calculated. For the proposed structure, we found that the ratio of the orders of resonant transmittance peaks for two different high-order modes of the ring resonator is close to the ratio of the two communication wavelengths 1310 and 1550 nm. These resonance wavelengths of the demultiplexer are effortlessly tuned by varying the refractive index of the material in the ring resonator and the geometrical parameters of the structure. The results simulated by FEM agree well with those from the resonant theory of the ring resonator. The presented structures will have significant potential applications in highly integrated plasmonic devices.