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    Portable colorimetric photonic indicator for ethanol concentration sensing

    Year: 2023

    Authors: Qi, Yong; Kou, Donghui; Sun, Yudong; Hu, Tong; Yuan, Hang; Zhou, Changtong; Li, Chang; Lu, An-Hui; Wu, Suli; Zhang, Shufen

    Keywords: Alcohol distillation; Colorimetric photonic indicator; Ethanol concentration sensing; Hydrogen bond; Structural color

    Colorimetric sensing of ethanol concentration accelerates the intellectualization of the ethanol industry. The development of alcohol detectors with excellent structural color output and reconfigurable nanostructures will certainly set off reform in colorimeter sensors. Here, a novel portable colorimetric photonic indicator (CPI) that can distinguish alcohol with concentrations from 0 to 100 % was ingeniously fabricated by bridging the copolymer capable of autonomic solvent control with porous structure via shape memory photonic crystals (PCs). CPI shows an ultrafast color response (<1 s) to the perception of ethanol concentration and outputs structural colors from blue to red, with reflection covering ∼477 to ∼628 nm. The coloration and color-change mechanisms of CPI are derived from the hydrogen bonds remodeling among carboxyls, ethylene glycol groups, and solvent molecules, the shape memory effect of the inverse opal skeleton, and the reversible structural transformation induced by the solvent co-solvency effect. We validate the real-time visual concentration-detection capabilities of CPI by measuring the distillate concentration during the alcohol distillation. We envisage that CPIs show potential applications in automated and broad-spectrum molecule-detection devices in biomedical and chemical engineering.
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