Luminescent Metal organic frameworks for sensing of aqueous heavy metal ions

Environmental pollution has become one of the biggest issues of the modern society. The contamination of soils, water and air by heavy metals, pesticides, gases, dioxins etc. pose a severe treat to environment and human health and affect the future generations. For these reasons, researchers around the world are currently working on developing new materials and technologies to preserve nature and offer a better future for the next generations. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are materials that could help in this challenge thanks to their outstanding properties, extreme flexibility and relative ease of synthesis. In recent years, MOFs are showing that they are not only extremely porous materials and excellent catalysts, but some of them have also interesting optical properties making them good candidates for LEDs and luminescent sensors. In particular, using luminescent MOFs (LMOFs) as sensors for qualitative and quantitative detection of pollutants has notable advantages: the crystalline structure of the MOFs is capable to select and concentrate the analyte and exclude potential interfering species enhancing considerably the sensitivity. Moreover, it is possible to design sensors that could be reused by recovering the MOFs. The aim of this doctoral thesis was to investigate various aspects of luminescent Metal Organic Frameworks (LMOFs), with a primary focus on developing a luminescent MOF-based sensor for detecting water pollutants, specifically heavy metal ions, and subsequently on designing a portable electronic device incorporating the sensor. For this reason, the project was carried out in collaboration with Infobiotech s.r.l. which have provided their expertise for the realization and development of the device. Furthermore, this project provided the opportunity to explore more theoretical aspects of LMOFs, such as the relationship between structure and luminescent properties.