One-Dimensional Phononic Crystals: A Simplified Platform for Effective Detection of Heavy Metals in Water with High Sensitivity

Recently, the pollution of fresh water with heavy metals due to technological and industrial breakthroughs has reached record levels. Therefore, monitoring these metals in fresh water has become essentially urgent. Meanwhile, the conventional periodic one-dimensional phononic crystals can provide a novel platform for detecting the pollution of heavy metals in fresh water with high sensitivity. A simplified design of a defective, one-dimensional phononic crystals (1D-PnC) structure is introduced in this paper. The sensor is designed from a lead-epoxy multilayer with a central defect layer filled with an aqueous solution from cadmium bromide (CdBr2). The formation of a resonant peak through the transmittance spectrum is highly expected. This study primarily aims to monitor and detect the concentration of cadmium bromide in pure water based on shifting the position of this resonant peak. Notably, any change in cadmium bromide concentration can affect the acoustic properties of cadmium bromide directly. The transfer matrix method has been used to calculate the transmission spectra of the incident acoustic wave. The numerical findings are mainly based on the optimization of the cadmium bromide layer thickness, lead layer thickness, epoxy layer thickness, and the number of periods to investigate the most optimum sensor performance. The introduced sensor in this study has provided a remarkably high sensitivity (S = 1904.25 Hz) within a concentration range of (0-10,000 ppm). The proposed sensor provides a quality factor (QF), a resolution, and a figure of merit of 1398.51752, 48,875,750 Hz, and 4.12088 × 10-5 (/ppm), respectively. Accordingly, this sensor can be a potentially robust base for a promising platform to detect small concentrations of heavy metal ions in fresh water.