Film-based fluorescence
sensing is recognized as one of the most
optimized techniques for trace analysis of chemicals in the air after
the invention of ion mobility spectrometry. The performance of the
technique is highly dependent on the design of the film. This paper
reports a new fluorescent film which shows unprecedented and discriminative
sensing performance to the presence of phenol, o-cresol, m-cresol, and p-cresol in the air with
an ultralow detection limit as low as 0.4, 0.3, 10, and 0.8 ppt, respectively.
The film was designed via combination of the advantages of aggregation-induced
emission (AIE) and those of intramolecular charge transfer (ICT),
where the former provides the opportunity to avoid the widely encountered
aggregation-caused quenching (ACQ) effect and the latter allows sensitive
sensing of the microenvironment change of the film. The biggest challenge
of the design is to find a fluorophore possessing both AIE and ICT
effects. Fortunately, a newly synthesized biphenyl derivative of o-carborane capped with azetidine moiety (BZPCarb) shows
the properties as expected. Importantly, the fluorophore is photochemically
stable, a prerequirement for multiple uses of a film device. In addition,
the nonplanar structure of the fluorophore is also favorable for film
sensing as it could form porous films owing to screening of dense
stacking of the molecules. It is the merits that make BZPCarb-based
film show outstanding sensing and discriminative performances. Based
on the fluorophore and the design, a conceptual high-performance fluorescent
vapor sensor for phenolic compounds was developed.