Design and manufacturing of improved optical systems for surface plasmon imaging

Surface Plasmon Resonance Imaging (SPRi) finds its applications in chemical and biological analysis because its label free and non-destructive. Present sensor systems suffer from missing transportability and are only used in laboratories. Portable and low priced SPRi sensors with high resolution show a huge potential for applications in harsh environments, remote areas and consumables. For designing a robust sensor system, discrete components and moving parts need to be substituted by a monolithic design. This transfer was done by integration of an LED and a 16 bit camera into a single glass component. Since the designed SPRi system is reflectivity based, the incident light at the sensor area was collimated by a lens system. The sensor area of SPRi was a thin gold layer with sensitive receptors depending on the target molecules and the gray scales of the ROI´s (regions of interest) were evaluated by imaging processing. An important contribution to a cheap and monolithic sensor design was done by milling and polishing on 5-axis milling machines. Milling technologies using diamond end mills and polishing tools were evaluated and feasibility of complex sensor designs was verified.