Polymeric Sensor Materials: Toward an Alliance of Combinatorial and Rational Design Tools?

Abstract

Increased selectivity, response speed, and sensitivity in the chemical and biological determinations of gases and liquids are of great interest. Particular attention is paid to polymeric sensor materials, which are applicable to sensors exploiting various energy transduction principles, such as radiant, electrical, mechanical, and thermal energy. Ideally, numerous functional parameters of sensor materials can be tailored to meet specific needs using rational design approaches. However, increasing the structural and functional complexity of polymeric sensor materials makes it more difficult to predict the desired properties. Combinatorial and high-throughput methods have had an impact on all areas of research on polymer-based sensor materials including homo- and copolymers, formulated materials, polymeric structures with engineered morphology, and molecular shape-recognition materials. Herein we report on the state-of-the-art, the development trends, and the remaining knowledge gaps in the area of combinatorial polymeric sensor materials design.

Poly(2‐oxazoline)s: Alive and Kicking

“…To manage the rapid synthesis and screening, high-throughput approaches seem to be ideally suited. [7][8][9] High-throughput experimentation methods have also been applied by other research groups to determine structure-property relationships in, e.g., polymeric sensor materials, [10] crosslinked materials, [11] and biomaterials. [12] In our studies, we have chosen the cationic ring-opening polymerization of 2-oxazolines, which was first reported in 1966 by four independent research groups, [13][14][15][16] for the library preparation.…”

Threshold Temperature Sensors with Tunable Properties

“…Some examples of these stimuli include heat, [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] deformation, [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] chemicals, [21][22][23] light, [24][25][26] and others, [27,28] which make the sensors useful for a wide range of technologies. [29,30] We recently reported on a new class of polymers with built-in optical deformation [31][32][33][34][35] and threshold temperature [33,34,36] sensors.…”

Computational Approaches to Design and Evaluation of Chemical Sensing Materials

“…Potyrailo has used combinatorial and high-throughput experimentation for the development of new sensor materials. 16 Computational methods cannot generally produce the level of confidence in sensor performance that can be found with experimental data; however, initial screening with computational methods could be used to reduce the time and effort necessary to optimize the materials selected for a sensing array. Once a set of possible materials has been selected, optimizing the array with the best set must be done using computational-experimental methods.…”

“…14 In this method, log K is modeled as a linear combination of terms related to particular types of interactions terms, dipolarity/polarizability (sp 2 H ), polarizability (rR2), hydrogen-bonding (åa 2 H ), hydrogen-bonding (b åb 2 H ), and combination of dispersion interaction and cavity term (l log L 16 ) and a coefficient (r, s, a, b, or the letter l). All of these parameters except R 2 are free energy related.…”