Abstract
Mercury is considered the most hazardous pollutant of aquatic resources; it exerts numerous adverse effects on environmental and human health. To date, significant progress has been made in employing a variety of nanomaterials for the colorimetric detection of mercury ions. Electrospun nanofibers exhibit several beneficial features, including a large surface area, porous nature, and easy functionalization; thus, providing several opportunities to encapsulate a variety of functional materials for sensing applications with enhanced sensitivity and selectivity, and a fast response. In this review, several examples of electrospun nanofiber-based sensing platforms devised by utilizing the two foremost approaches, namely, direct incorporation and surface decoration envisioned for detection of mercury ions are provided. We believe these examples provide sufficient evidence for the potential use and progress of electrospun nanofibers toward colorimetric sensing of mercury ions. Furthermore, the summary of the review is focused on providing an insight into the future directions of designing electrospun nanofiber-based, metal ion colorimetric sensors for practical applications.
Highlights
Heavy metal pollution of water resources poses a major threat to human and environmental health because of the associated risks
The results indicate that the electrospun nanofibrous membrane possesses on/off switching capacity that could be applied in the heavy metal ion detection
Several probes have been functionalized in different varieties of electrospun nanofibers through direct incorporation and surface decoration approaches to invent colorimetric sensors with competitive performances
Summary
Heavy metal pollution of water resources poses a major threat to human and environmental health because of the associated risks. Electrospun nanofibers offer promising characteristics, including nanoscale fiber diameters, a nanofibers offer promising characteristics, including fiber diameters, a large largeElectrospun surface area, a nanoporous structure, design flexibility andnanoscale functionalization with various surface area, a nanoporous structure, design flexibility and functionalization with various molecules molecules through different approaches, extreme flexibility, proper mechanical strength, and easy through different flexibility, easy fabrication fabrication from aapproaches, wide rangeextreme of materials with proper diversemechanical structural strength, features, and which extends their from a wide range of sectors materials with diverse structural features, which extends [23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35] Their potential in various potential in various from environmental to biomedical applications.
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