Water-dispersible X-ray scintillators enabling coating and blending with polymer materials for multiple applications

Hailei Zhang; Bo Zhang; Chongyang Cai; Kaiming Zhang; Yu Wang; Yuan Wang; Yanmin Yang; Yonggang Wu; Xinwu Ba; Richard Hoogenboom

doi:10.1038/s41467-024-46287-8

Water-dispersible X-ray scintillators enabling coating and blending with polymer materials for multiple applications

Nat Commun. 2024 Mar 6;15(1):2055. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-46287-8.

Authors

Hailei Zhang^{1

2}, Bo Zhang³, Chongyang Cai⁴, Kaiming Zhang⁵, Yu Wang³, Yuan Wang³, Yanmin Yang⁶, Yonggang Wu³, Xinwu Ba³, Richard Hoogenboom⁷

Affiliations

¹ College of Chemistry & Materials Science, Hebei University, 180 Wusi Road, 071002, Baoding, China. zhanghailei@hbu.edu.cn.
² Supramolecular Chemistry Group, Centre of Macromolecular Chemistry (CMaC), Department of Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry, Ghent University, Krijgslaan, 281-S4, 9000, Gent, Belgium. zhanghailei@hbu.edu.cn.
³ College of Chemistry & Materials Science, Hebei University, 180 Wusi Road, 071002, Baoding, China.
⁴ College of Physics Science and Technology, Hebei University, 180 Wusi Road, 071002, Baoding, China.
⁵ Supramolecular Chemistry Group, Centre of Macromolecular Chemistry (CMaC), Department of Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry, Ghent University, Krijgslaan, 281-S4, 9000, Gent, Belgium.
⁶ College of Physics Science and Technology, Hebei University, 180 Wusi Road, 071002, Baoding, China. mihuyym@163.com.
⁷ Supramolecular Chemistry Group, Centre of Macromolecular Chemistry (CMaC), Department of Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry, Ghent University, Krijgslaan, 281-S4, 9000, Gent, Belgium. richard.hoogenboom@ugent.be.

Abstract

Developing X-ray scintillators that are water-dispersible, compatible with polymeric matrices, and processable to flexible substrates is an important challenge. Herein, Tb³⁺-doped Na₅Lu₉F₃₂ is introduced as an X-ray scintillating material with steady-state X-ray light yields of 15,800 photons MeV^-1, which is generated as nanocrystals on halloysite nanotubes. The obtained product exhibits good water-dispersibility and highly sensitive luminescence to X-rays. It is deposited onto a polyurethane foam to afford a composite foam material with dose-dependent radioluminescence. Moreover, the product is dispersed into polymer matrixes in aqueous solution to prepare rigid or flexible scintillator screen for X-ray imaging. As a third example, it is incorporated multilayer hydrogels for information camouflage and multilevel encryption. Encrypted information can be recognized only by X-ray irradiation, while the false information is read out under UV light. Altogether, we demonstrate that the water-dispersible scintillators are highly promising for aqueous processing of radioluminescent, X-ray imaging, and information encrypting materials.