Metal complexes of vic-dioximes for chemical gas sensing

Metal complexes of vic-dioximes are characterized as new candidate materials for volatile organic compound sensing with sorption based chemical gas sensors. They are proposed as an interesting alternative to conventional sensing materials with metal ion centers such as phthalocyanines or porphyrins. Besides, they are considered an appealing platform to study metal effects on analyte sorption and sensor performance due to a high variety in possible metal centers. In this work, the sensing properties are explored with the quartz crystal microbalance on the basis of a set of vic-dioximes complexes varied in their metal ion centers (Ni2+, Pd2+, Cu2+, Co2+) and substituents (alkyl chain lengths from C3H7 up to C7H15) and twelve selected analytes. Depending on the metal center and substituents widely diverging selectivity patterns were observed indicating preferences for alcohols, amines, and aromatic compounds. The results presented in this work show that the proposed metal complexes of vic-dioximes are excellent sensing materials and very promising for the use in chemical gas sensor array applications.