High photoluminescent nitrogen and zinc doped carbon dots for sensing Fe3+ ions and temperature

Sai Kumar Tammina; Dezhi Yang; Xiao Li; Sivasankar Koppala; Yaling Yang

doi:10.1016/j.saa.2019.117141

High photoluminescent nitrogen and zinc doped carbon dots for sensing Fe³⁺ ions and temperature

Spectrochim Acta A Mol Biomol Spectrosc. 2019 Nov 5:222:117141. doi: 10.1016/j.saa.2019.117141. Epub 2019 May 21.

Authors

Sai Kumar Tammina¹, Dezhi Yang¹, Xiao Li¹, Sivasankar Koppala², Yaling Yang³

Affiliations

¹ Faculty of Environmental Science and Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Yunnan Province 650500, China.
² Faculty of Metallurgical and Energy Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming 650093, Yunnan, China.
³ Faculty of Environmental Science and Engineering, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Yunnan Province 650500, China. Electronic address: yilyil8@163.com.

PMID: 31247390
DOI: 10.1016/j.saa.2019.117141

Abstract

High photoluminescent quantum yield carbon nanomaterials doped with heteroatoms are of profound attention in various fields like bio-imaging, chemical sensors and electronics. Among all heteroatoms, zinc is one of the low toxic significant elements and also involves in various electron-transfer processes. These properties are added advantages to utilize zinc as a dopant in CDs synthesis. In this investigation, our group reports a one-step microwave digestion method to synthesize nitrogen and Zinc doped carbon dots (N, Zn-CDs). The optical properties of N, Zn-CDs were investigated using UV-Vis and fluorescence spectrophotometry and also the N, Zn-CDs structural features were studied with other characterization tools like XPS, TEM, EDX, FTIR and XRD. N, Zn-CDs inherent the appreciable photoluminescent quantum yields about 63.28%. And the synthesized N, Zn-CDs utilized for detection of Fe³⁺ and temperature. The observed results are promising and exhibited the detection limit of 0.027 μM. Also, the proposed sensing system was successfully adopted for the detection of Fe³⁺ in the river and circulating water samples for the practical applications and satisfactory results are observed. The current synthesis methodology and sensing potential might open up a new prospect to develop potential applications in environmental monitoring.

Keywords: Fe(3+) sensor; N, Zn-CDs; Photoluminescence; Real sample analysis; Temperature detection.