Scientists in Japan have come up with an inexpensive new material that can quickly and accurately detect specific gases in the air. The compound has been tested under a variety of conditions and has been found to be reusable.
It also emits variable degrees of visible light which correspond to different gas concentrations. This enhances its applicability as a building block for easy to use monitoring devices. It is a flexible crystalline material that can transform with changes in the environment.
The researchers at the Kyoto University were essentially looking for a method to detect the CO2 that the energy industry tends to expel in large quantities. They wanted to develop a lower power method than the one that is currently used to detect CO2 gas.
They came up with a flexible crystalline material (porous coordination polymer, or PCP) which transforms according to changes in the environment. If the material is infused with a fluorescent reporter molecule (distyrylbenzene, or DSB), the composite becomes sensitive specifically to carbon dioxide gas, glowing with varying intensity based on changing concentrations of the gas.
Dr Nobuhiro Yanai of the university's Graduate School of Engineering, said that the real test for us was to see whether the composite could differentiate between carbon dioxide and acetylene, which have similar physiochemical properties. He added that their findings clearly show this PCP-DSB combination reacts very differently to the two gases, making accurate CO2 detection possible in a wide variety of applications.