Chemically modified silica-based sensors: Effect of the nature of organosilane

The use of organosilanes to produce hybrid materials, also known as ORMOSILs (organically modified silicas) can be a good strategy to tune a material's properties, enabling, for example, the optimization of important features of chemical sensors such as specificity, sensitivity and response time. Thus, different hybrid silicas were prepared by the sol-gel method to be employed as a colorimetric sensor. The investigated organic groups for producing hybrid materials included methyl, octyl, octadecyl, vinyl, phenyl, aminopropyl, isocyanatopropyl, mercaptopropyl, chloropropyl, iodopropyl and glycidoxypropyl groups, and the pH indicator alizarin red was used as the encapsulated receptor element. The sensors were characterized using a set of complementary techniques such as UV-vis spectroscopy, cyclic and differential pulse voltammetry, nuclear magnetic resonance, nitrogen porosimetry, small-angle X-ray scattering and transmission electronic microscopy. The performance was evaluated according to the color change (Delta E-ab*) by conducing a colorimetric analysis and measuring the response time after ammonia exposure, with results varying from 48 to 95 s. Additionally, other characteristics of the hybrid materials, such as their surface area, reticulation degree, texture and morphologic properties, were altered depending on the organic modification present in the silica network. The potentiality for material optimization, to achieve better sensor performance, depends on the employed organosilane.