Solid-supported synergistic twain probes with aggregation-induced emission: A sensing platform for fingerprinting...

Area of Science:

• Materials Science
• Analytical Chemistry
• Organic Chemistry

Background:

• Aggregation-induced emission (AIE) materials offer unique optical properties.
• Developing selective and sensitive chemical sensors is crucial for environmental and industrial monitoring.
• Amine detection remains a significant challenge in various analytical applications.

Purpose of the Study:

• To synthesize novel AIE solid emitters with donor-acceptor (D-A) pairs.
• To investigate their potential as solid-supported sensors for amine detection.
• To establish a fingerprinting method for differentiating various amines.

Main Methods:

• Synthesis of DMA and HBA solid emitters.
• Characterization of AIE properties and solvatochromic effects.
• Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations for electronic structure analysis.
• Fabrication of solid-supported sensing films and gas-phase amine detection.
• Analysis of time-dependent emission spectra and development of a 2D coordinate system for amine identification.

Main Results:

• Synthesized DMA and HBA emitters exhibit AIE, charge transfer (CT) emission, and solvatochromism.
• The emitters show rapid fluorescent responses to amines, with spectral changes attributed to CT to locally excited (LE) state transitions.
• Sensing films demonstrated low detection limits for ammonia gas (2.61 Pa for DMA, 2.63 Pa for HBA).
• A two-dimensional fingerprint map based on emission wavelength and quenching efficiency successfully differentiated various amines.

Conclusions:

• The developed AIE emitters function as effective solid-supported amine sensors.
• The fingerprinting approach provides a robust method for identifying diverse amines.
• DMA and HBA act as synergistic probes for advanced amine sensing applications.