A novel water-stable luminescent metal complex exhibiting high sensitive and selective detection to Fe3+ and Al3+.

A tetraphenyl ethylene-based zinc complex with strong fluorescence properties and good water stability has been elaborately designed and synthesized. The complex is very sensitive to Fe3+ and Al3+ ions in water with detection limits of 0.31 μM and 0.913 μM, respectively. • A tetraphenyl ethylene-based zinc complex was designed and synthesized. • The complex can be used as an excellent fluorescence probe to detect Fe3+ and Al3+. • Compared with other reported complexes, this probe has a lower detection limit. The application of metal complexes as fluorescent sensor materials has attracted great attention. In this work, we designed and synthesized a tetraphenyl ethylene-based zinc complex {[ZnLCl]·H 2 O} n (1), which not only has excellent water stability, but also shows good photoluminescence behavior. These properties endow 1 a good fluorescence detection ability to metal ions. The experimental results also confirm that the fluorescence behavior of 1 can be quenched by Fe3+ or Al3+ rapidly and sensitively. When other metal ions coexist with Fe3+ or Al3+, 1 can still effectively recognize Fe3+ or Al3+. It means that 1 is a potential fluorescent sensor material with super anti-interference ability to detect Fe3+ or Al3+. The reason is that there are weak interactions between Fe3+/Al3+ and oxygen atoms in 1. Since there's the competitive absorption between Fe3+ and 1 , the quenching effect coefficient of Fe3+ is larger than that of Al3+ and the quenching effect is better than that of Al3+. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]