Exploiting Solvate Ionic Liquids for Amine Gas Analysis on a Quartz Crystal Microbalance

We demonstrated in this work the usefulness of solvate ionic liquids SIL 3 and SIL 4 for chemoselective detection of amine gases on a quartz crystal microbalance. This detection of gaseous amines was achieved by nucleophilic aromatic addition reactions with super electrophilic SIL 3 or SIL 4 thin-coated on quartz chips. Starting with inexpensive reagents, functional SIL 3 and SIL 4 could be readily synthesized in two short steps with high isolated yield (81 and 77%, respectively). The QCM platform developed in this work is readily applicable and highly sensitive to low molecular weight amine gases: for propylamine gas at 10 Hz decrease in resonance frequency, the sensitivity of detection using SIL 4 was 5.4 ppb. This simple and convenient assembly of neutral ligands (e.g., 1a and 1b) with Li+ ion to afford room temperature ionic liquids should be of great importance for a myriad of applications. To the best of our knowledge, no example to date of reports based on nucleophilic aromatic addition reactions demonstrating sensitive amine gas detection in solvate ionic liquids on a QCM has been reported. Furthermore, because of the high color intensity of the Meisenheimer complexes formed, our preliminary result showed that SIL 4 loaded on copier paper can be used not only as a portable amine gas sensor but also as a potential invisible ink that is only revealed by amine vapor.