Fabrication of Robust and Porous Lead Chloride-Based Metal–Organic Frameworks toward a Selective and Sensitive Smart NH3 Sensor

Organolead halide materials have shown promising optoelectronic properties that are suitable for light-emitting diodes (e.g., strong photoluminescence, narrow emission width, and high charge carrier mobility). However, the vast majority of them have no open porosity or open metal sites for host-guest interactions and are therefore not widely applicable in intrinsic fluorescent sensing of small molecules. Herein, we report a lead chloride-based metal-organic framework (MOF) with high porosity and stability and promising photoluminescent characteristics, performing as a sensitive, selective, and long-term stable fluorescence probe for NH3. For the first time, a homemade dynamic real-time photoluminescence monitoring system was developed, which showed that our haloplumbate-based MOF has an immediate response and an extremely low limit of detection (12 ppm) toward NH3. A variety of experimental characterization and theoretical calculations evidenced that the photoluminescence quenching was ascribed to the coordination between NH3 guests and exposed Pb2+ centers in MOFs. Moreover, a portable on-site smart NH3 detector was designed based on this haloplumbate-MOF using a 3D printer, and the quantitative recovery experiment demonstrated the effective detection of NH3 in the range of 15-150 ppm. This study opens a new pathway to design organolead halide-based MOFs to perform on-site chemical sensing of small molecules and shows their high potential to monitor safety concentrations of NH3 in different industrial sites.