article · ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces
Formic acid is an essential industrial chemical and potential hydrogen storage medium, but exposure to its vapour can cause severe health hazards such as chemical burns and nerve injury. To address the need for rapid detection, a quartz crystal microbalance sensor has been developed using colloidal phenyl-terminated carbon nitride quantum nanoflakes. The material is produced through a solid-state supramolecular preorganisation approach that completely avoids hazardous chemicals, hard templates, and hydrothermal processing. Experimental testing and theoretical calculations confirm that chemical and hydrogen bonding allow the sensor to capture formic acid vapour with high selectivity over related compounds like formaldehyde and acetic acid. The device demonstrates a sensitivity of 128.99 Hz per ppm and a detection limit of 80 parts per billion, providing an efficient route for trace vapour detection.
Formic acid vapour poses serious safety risks, including nerve damage and chemical burns, across pharmaceuticals, leather tanning, and chemical processing. Traditional detection methods can be complex or insensitive to trace levels. Providing a low-cost, highly selective nanomaterial that detects sub-part-per-million concentrations helps improve industrial safety monitoring and the protection of workers handling volatile chemicals.
This technology is targeted at industrial safety and air monitoring applications, specifically for integration into smart electronic noses. It offers equipment manufacturers a low-cost sensing material to selectively differentiate formic acid from formaldehyde and acetic acid. The research is at an applied laboratory stage, having demonstrated successful material synthesis and sensor performance testing, but it requires further engineering into field-ready sensing instruments.
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Formic acid (HCOOH) is an important intermediate in chemical synthesis, pharmaceuticals, the food industry, and leather tanning and is considered to be an effective hydrogen storage molecule. Direct contact with its vapor and its inhalation lead to burns, nerve injury, and dermatosis. Thus, it is critical to establish efficient sensing materials and devices for the rapid detection of HCOOH. In the present study, we introduce a chemical sensor based on a quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) sensor capable of detecting trace amounts of HCOOH. This sensor is composed of colloidal phenyl-terminated carbon nitride (Ph-g-C<sub>3</sub>N<sub>4</sub>) quantum nanoflakes prepared using a facile solid-state method involving the supramolecular preorganization technology. In contrast to other synthetic methods of modified carbon nitride materials, this approach requires no hard templates, hazardous chemicals, or hydrothermal treatments. Comprehensive characterization and density functional theory (DFT) calculations revealed that the QCM sensor designed and prepared here exhibits enhanced detection sensitivity and selectivity for volatile HCOOH, which originates from chemical and hydrogen-bonding interactions between HCOOH and the surface of Ph-g-C<sub>3</sub>N<sub>4</sub>. According to DFT results, HCOOH is located close to the cavity of the Ph-g-C<sub>3</sub>N<sub>4</sub> unit, with bonding to graphitic carbon and pyridinic nitrogen atoms of the nanoflake. The sensitivity of the Ph-g-C<sub>3</sub>N<sub>4</sub>-nanoflake-based QCM sensor was found to be the highest (128.99 Hz ppm<sup>-1</sup>) of the substances studied, with a limit of detection (LOD) of HCOOH down to a sub-ppm level of 80 ppb. This sensing technology based on phenyl-terminated attached-g-C<sub>3</sub>N<sub>4</sub> nanoflakes establishes a simple, low-cost solution to improve the performance of QCM sensors for the effective discrimination of HCOOH, HCHO, and CH<sub>3</sub>COOH vapors using smart electronic noses.
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DOI: 10.1021/acsami.1c12196
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