8 - Metal-organic frameworks for detection and desensitization of environmentally hazardous nitro-explosives and related high energy materials

Abstract

Sensing of nitro-aromatic compounds (NACs) and related high energy materials (HEMs) has attracted huge attention because of increasing terrorist activity as well as environmental pollution. Sensing in both vapor phase and aqueous media of such explosive materials has become essential to reduce the aforementioned threats. In this regard, luminescent metal-organic frameworks (LMOFs), which are crystalline porous extended networks, have provided a new avenue to detect NACs and related explosive compounds. The crystalline nature for better structure property correlation, tunable pore architecture, high surface area, etc. have made metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) suitable candidates for the sensing applications. LMOFs have shown tremendous advancements in the domain of sensing of nitro-explosives and related materials in both vapor and aqueous media via both “turn-on” and “turn-off” signal generation. Furthermore, MOFs have also been explored for the desensitization of HEMs. MOF-based desensitization has led to the reduction of the explosive nature of such materials which can be very useful for the relatively safer handling of explosive materials.