Instant Fingerprint Discrimination for Military Explosive Vapors by Dy³⁺ Doping a La₂O₃-Based Cataluminescence Sensor...

With the intensification of explosive-based terrorism attack and environmental concerns, the innovation of high-efficiency and portable sensors for facile, rapid, and reliable monitoring of explosives has become one of the major demands in societies. Herein, a reliable and easy-to-use cataluminescence sensor system based on Dy³⁺ doping La₂O₃ nanorod catalysts has been developed for the identification and detection of six types of military explosive vapors, including homologous compounds and even isomers. The efficient discrimination is to make full use of the thermodynamic and kinetic information that can be extracted from the catalytic oxidation process of explosive molecules on various sensing materials, that is, the response signal and response time to generate the fingerprint of each target compound, while the rapid detection of the strategy can be manifested in response toward six military explosive vapors within 2.5 s and recover within 4 s. Meanwhile, the quantitative analysis of the explosives by the sensor system was realized based on 0.8%Dy:La₂O₃ with optimal catalytic activity, and the detection limits of NB, m-MNT, m-DNB, PNT, DNT, and TNT can reach 0.62, 0.49, 0.63, 0.38, 0.023, and 0.067 μg mL^-1. In this research, we also constructed a novel sensor device and detection platform for explosive monitoring, which is of great significance for providing a new sensing principle for the efficient identification of explosives.