Quartz Crystal Microbalance Analysis of Diels–Alder Reactions of Alkene Gases to Functional Ionic Liquids on Chips

We demonstrated here a successful development of the use of functional ionic liquids FIL 1 and FIL 3 for chemoselective detection of alkene gases measured by quartz crystal microbalance. This detection of gaseous alkenes was achieved by the Diels–Alder [4 + 2] cycloadditions with FIL 1 and FIL 3 thin-coated on quartz chips. Our functional ionic liquids could be prepared by straightforward synthetic chemistry in short steps and are superior in alkene gas detection. The QCM platform developed in this work is chemoselective with fast gas diffusion into ionic liquids, readily applicable to low molecular weight alkene gases and insensitive to moisture. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report based upon the Diels–Alder reactions demonstrating sensitive alkene gas detection in ionic liquids on a QCM. This work is a proof-of-concept inspection of the promising use of a QCM-based sensor method for reaction-directed detection of gas samples, which is part of an ongoing program aimed at studying diseases.