Functional Construction of a Novel Lanthanide MOF for Efficient Ratio Luminescence Detection of Ethanol Vapor

Abstract It is necessary to develop excellent sensors for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) detection from the perspective of environmental protection and human health. Luminescent lanthanide metal‐organic frameworks (MOFs) have many advantages such as porosity, luminescence, and structural controllability, making them very suitable as luminescent sensing materials. Based on a functional oriented strategy, novel Ln‐MOFs are successfully constructed and their structure and properties are characterized in detail. A series of vapor luminescence sensing tests have shown that Eu/Tb doped L1‐Eu_0.1/Tb_0.9 not only exhibits high selectivity for alcohols, especially ethanol vapor, but also has high sensitivity and extremely low detection limit (9.76 mg L⁻¹). To the knowledge, there are no reports on ratio luminescence sensors based on Ln‐MOFs for ethanol vapor, especially those with such excellent performance. Crystal structure determination demonstrates that ethanol binds to the framework through multiple hydrogen bonding interactions, altering the energy transfer efficiency between Tb³⁺ and Eu³⁺ to achieve ratio luminescence detection. In addition, L1‐Eu_0.1/Tb_0.9 has good repeatability, the prepared thin film sensing material also demonstrates the advantages of portability and processability. This work can provide some experience for the development of VOCs sensing materials with better performance.