Hydrotalcite-assisted cataluminescence: A new approach for sensing mesityl oxide in aldol condensation of acetone

Abstract

Currently, the well-established applications of nanomaterial-based cataluminescence (CTL) included the development of gas sensors for measuring a variety of volatile organic reactants and the rapid screening of nanocatalysts. There is obviously no good reason to disregard the identification of reaction products using nanomaterial-based CTL probes. In this work, we discovered the interesting connections between CTL signals and the contents of mesityl oxide, which is one of the important reaction products in the layered double hydroxide (LDH)-catalyzed acetone aldol condensation. Therefore, we have successfully developed a novel approach for rapid analysis of mesityl oxide using a LDH-assisted CTL probe. Mesityl oxide could be assayed in the range of 1.0–50mM, and the detection limit for mesityl oxide (S/N=3) was 0.5mM. The developed CTL probe exhibited some advantages, such as simple configuration, fast response, and easy operation. The effectiveness and reliability of this approach for identifying mesityl oxide were further confirmed by comparing with a commercially available gas chromatography/mass spectrometry method. We believe that this strategy would stimulate the future development of the identification of reaction products in a variety of organic reactions by tuning CTL probe molecules.