Determination of oxygen concentration is required in many different fields such as medicine, biotechnology, environmental analysis, food industry and etc. Therefore, it is necessary to put additional efforts to the development of cost efficient, stable and reliable oxygen sensing systems. Up to now commercial oxygen sensitive probes are based on heavy metal complexes. These compounds exhibit high photoluminescence quantum efficiency, the rare, conceivably toxic and expensive heavy metals, such as platinum and iridium are a drawback. Metal-free organic materials showing room temperature phosphorescence (RTP) or thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) are attractive alternatives to organic metal complexes because of their low cost, abundant and environmentally friendly properties, flexible synthesis, and high stability. The aim of the project is to develop organic semiconductors exhibiting RTP and/or TADF for oxygen sensing probes, which could be utilized as ratiometric oxygen sensing systems using suitable host-guest systems.
Project funding:
Projects funded by the Research Council of Lithuania (RCL), Projects carried out by researchers’ teams
Project results:
The development of oxygen sensing system will be carried out in stages. First of all, new metal-free donor-acceptor (D-A) molecules, depending on conformers di?erent emission pathway, will be designed and characterized theoretically by density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Then based on the results of DFT calculations, the synthesis and characterization of the most promising compounds will be performed. Secondly, oxygen sensing compositions as host-guest systems will be developed by testing newly synthesized materials molecularly dispersed in various polymer matrixes. The photophysical properties and oxygen sensing abilities of emitter–host matrix system will be investigated and efficient compositions will be tested in oxygen sensing systems. We believe that metal-free organic emitters together with selected suitable host matrix will provide environmentally friendly, cost-efficient and biocompatible optical oxygen sensors.
Period of project implementation: 2023-07-01 - 2026-06-30
Project coordinator: Kaunas University of Technology
