A Soluble Porous Coordination Polymer for Fluorescence Sensing of Explosives and Toxic Anions under Homogeneous Environment

Abstract

In the past decades, porous coordination polymers (PCPs) based fluorescent (FL) sensors have received intense attention due to their promising applications. In this work, a soluble Zn-PCP is presented as a sensitive probe towards explosive molecules, chromate, and dichromate ions. In former reports, PCP sensors were usually ground into fine powders and then dispersed in solvents to form FL emulsion for sensing applications. However, their insoluble characters would cause the sensing accuracy which is prone to interference from environmental effects. While in this work, the as-made PCP could be directly soluble in organic solvents to form a clear solution with bright blue emission, representing the first soluble PCP based fluorescence sensor to probe explosive molecules under a homogeneous environment. Moreover, the FL PCP solution also shows sensitive detection behaviors towards the toxic anions of CrO42− and Cr2O72−, which exhibit a good linear relationship between the fluorescence intensity of Zn-PCP and the concentrations of both analytes. This work provides a reference for designing task-specific PCP sensors utilized under a homogeneous environment.