Here, we designed and developed an organic field-effect transistor (OFET)-based gas sensor by applying solvatochromic dye (Nile red, NR) with twisted intramolecular charge-transfer (TICT) behavior depending on the polarity of the surrounding molecules, as an auxiliary NR sensing medium (aNR-SM). As a polar molecule approaches, intra-charge transfers from the donor diethylamine group to the ketone group occur in the NR molecule, resulting in the twisting of the donor functional group and thereby increasing its dipole moment. Using this characteristic, NR was applied as an auxiliary sensing medium to the OFET for detecting ammonia (NH3), a representative toxic gas. The Top-NR case, where the aNR-SM covers only the top of the organic semiconductor layer, showed the best gas sensing performance, and its response and recovery rates were improved by 46 and 94%, respectively, compared to the pristine case. More importantly, a sensitivity of 0.87 ± 0.045 ppm-1 % was measured, having almost perfect linearity (0.999) over the range of measured NH3 concentrations, which is the result of solving the saturation problem in the sensing characteristics of the OFET-based gas sensor. Our result not only improved the sensing performance of the OFET-based sensor but also made an important advance in that the reliability of the sensing performance was easily secured by applying solvatochromic and TICT behaviors of an auxiliary sensing medium.
Keywords: Nile red; TICT; chemical sensor; organic transistor; sensing medium; solvatochromism.