Preparation of novel optical fibre-based Cocaine sensors using a molecular imprinted polymer approach

Abstract

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Computational Design and Fabrication of Optical Fibre Fluorescent Chemical Probes for the Detection of Cocaine

“…Light from a LED (375 nm centre wavelength) was coupled through a multimode fibre with good UV/visible spectral transmittance and having a hard polymer cladding. [18] The fibre was of much larger diameter than "standard" communications fibre-at 1000 μm for the silica core-with a numerical aperture (NA) of 0.37. Further optical components such as collimation and focusing lenses were used, to couple light via a 2 × 1 Y fibre coupler, as can be seen from the diagram.…”

“…The design of the monomer is described next, showing the advance from work reported as earlier studies [16]- [18]. A critical aim has been to maximize the interactions between the drug and the chosen fluorescent monomer used as starting material for polymer synthesis.…”

“…This approach has allowed the creation of two optical fibre based Cocaine probes. The advance over the prior work by some of the authors lies in the improved Cocaine sensitivity [16]- [18]. Thus the work has been a critical step in designing and developing the first compact, hand-held Cocaine probe, based around stable synthetic molecular receptors, and thus a device which meets the requirements of security forces.…”

“…To address this, enhancing probe sensitivity and selectivity, over what has been seen with previous Cocaine probes [16]- [18], is critical and this has involved systematic, computational monomer design. Leading from that is the fabrication of highly sensitive sensors derived from MIPs incorporating what has been described in this work as acrylamide monomer 3.…”

Highly selective nanocomposite sorbents for the specific recognition of S-ibuprofen from structurally related compounds

“…These cavities are capable of recognizing the target molecule from its structurally related compounds. At present, molecular imprinted polymers (MIPs) are widely used in many areas of science such as sensing (Wren et al 2014), food sciences (Whitcombe et al 1997;Perreten et al 1997), separation sciences (McCluskey et al 2007;Zhang et al 2012), drug delivery (Puoci et al 2013) and isolation (Kyzas et al 2015), solid phase extraction (Ö zcan and Demirli 2014;Zarejousheghania et al 2014) and detection of pollutants (Jenkins et al 2001;Kyzas and Bikiaris 2014;. However, MIPs prepared by conventional manner do have some restrictions such as incomplete template removal, slow kinetics, less binding capacity, poor site accessibility (Turner et al 2006), etc.…”