Metal-Organic Framework Based Gas Sensors

The ever-increasing concerns over indoor/outdoor air quality, industrial gas leakage, food freshness, and medical diagnosis require miniaturized gas sensors with excellent sensitivity, selectivity, stability, low power consumption, cost-effectiveness, and long lifetime. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), featuring structural diversity, large specific surface area, controllable pore size/geometry, and host-guest interactions, hold great promises for fabricating various MOF-based devices for diverse applications including gas sensing. Tremendous progress has been made in the past decade on the fabrication of MOF-based sensors with elevated sensitivity and selectivity toward various analytes due to their preconcentrating and molecule-sieving effects. Although several reviews have recently summarized different aspects of this field, a comprehensive review focusing on MOF-based gas sensors is absent. In this review, the latest advance of MOF-based gas sensors relying on different transduction mechanisms, for example, chemiresistive, capacitive/impedimetric, field-effect transistor or Kelvin probe-based, mass-sensitive, and optical ones are comprehensively summarized. The latest progress for making large-area MOF films essential to the mass-production of relevant gas sensors is also included. The structural and compositional features of MOFs are intentionally correlated with the sensing performance. Challenges and opportunities for the further development and practical applications of MOF-based gas sensors are also given.