Interfacial self-assembly growth of mesoporous polydopamine nanofilms for formaldehyde sensing

Mesoporous polymer nanofilms combine the advantages of the unique structure of mesopores, the quasi-2D configuration of the films, and the inherent properties of polymers, and have become a kind of ideal candidate for the high-performance micro-nano devices due to their highly accessible surface area and exposed active sites. However, the facile preparation of polymer nanofilms with well-defined mesostructures has remained a great challenge due to the lack of synthetic strategies. In this study, we developed a simple soft-template interfacial co-assembly strategy to in-situ construct mesoporous polydopamine nanofilms with uniform thickness (30 nm) and regularly distributed mesopore arrays (average pore size of 12 nm) on surfaces with different types and morphologies. Furthermore, a single-layer mesoporous polymer nanofilm was directly grown on a quartz crystal microbalance substrate and its performance for sensing formaldehyde was studied. The resulted sensor showed excellent sensing response, fast response/recovery dynamics, and great stability, presenting a great promising landscape for trace detection of formaldehyde gas.