Exploiting Solvate Ionic Liquids for Amine Gas Analysis on a Quartz Crystal Microbalance

We demonstrated in this work the usefulness of solvate ionic liquids SIL 3 and SIL 4 for chemoselective detection of amine gases on a quartz crystal microbalance. This detection of gaseous amines was achieved by nucleophilic aromatic addition reactions with super electrophilic SIL 3 or SIL 4 thin-coated on quartz chips. Starting with inexpensive reagents, functional SIL 3 and SIL 4 could be readily synthesized in two short steps with high isolated yield (81 and 77%, respectively). The QCM platform developed in this work is readily applicable and highly sensitive to low molecular weight amine gases: for propylamine gas at 10 Hz decrease in resonance frequency, the sensitivity of detection using SIL 4 was 5.4 ppb. This simple and convenient assembly of neutral ligands (e.g., 1a and 1b) with Li+ ion to afford room temperature ionic liquids should be of great importance for a myriad of applications. To the best of our knowledge, no example to date of reports based on nucleophilic aromatic addition reactions d...