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Updated: Feb 1, 2026
Reactive Vapor Deposition of Conjugated Polymer Films on Arbitrary Substrates
Published on: January 17, 2018
Detection of NO2 Down to One ppb Using Ion-in-Conjugation-Inspired Polymer
Jin Zhou1, Xue-Feng Cheng1, Bi-Jun Gao1
1College of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Collaborative Innovation Center of Suzhou Nano Science and Technology, Soochow University, Suzhou, 215123, P. R. China.
Abstract:
Nitrogen dioxide (NO2 ) emission has severe impact on human health and the ecological environment and effective monitoring of NO2 requires the detection limit (limit of detection) of several parts-per-billion (ppb). All organic semiconductor-based NO2 sensors fail to reach such a level. In this work, using an ion-in-conjugation inspired-polymer (poly(3,3'-diaminobenzidine-squarine, noted as PDBS) as the sensory material, NO2 can be detected as low as 1 ppb, which is the lowest among all reported organic NO2 sensors. In addition, the sensor has high sensitivity, good reversibility, and long-time stability with a period longer than 120 d. Theoretical calculations reveal that PDBS offers unreacted amine and zwitterionic groups, which can offer both the H-bonding and ion-dipole interaction to NO2 . The moderate binding energies (≈0.6 eV) offer high sensitivity, selectivity as well as good reversibility. The results demonstrate that the ion-in-conjugation can be employed to greatly improve sensitivity and selectivity in organic gas sensors by inducing both H-bonding and ion-dipole attraction.
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