Monodisperse functionalized GO for water detection in wide range through synergistic enhancement effect

In this work, in order to solve the limitation of rhodamine B hydrazide (RBH) based water molecule detector (aggregation effect, poor optical stability, narrow detection range), a simple and effective method was studied. The specific design is as follows. Based on a simple thermodynamic controllable strategy, RBH is grafted onto a single layer graphene oxide (GO) via a covalent bond to prepare RBH functionlized graphene oxide (RBH-GO). The experimental results show that the resulting RBH-GO possesses very well monodispersion and hydrophilicity, particularly reduce the aggregation degree of alone RBH or GO owing to pi-pi stacking effect. Simultaneously, it is found that the prepared RBH-GO can detect water content in a very wide range (0.9-60 vol%, the volume percentage of water in the organic solvent) in organic solvent and food at room temperature 25 degrees C for production monitoring due to the strong synergistic effect between RBH and GO in resulting RBH-GO. The resulting RBH-GO not only possesses very well photostability, multiple repeated cycles and convenient application as a test paper, but also have been triumphantly put into the identification of H2O content in honey and salt specimens in practice for production quality control. The detection limit is as low as 0.21 vol%, and the correlation coefficient is 0.9997.

Automated summary

A water molecule detector based on graphene oxide was studied to address the limitations of traditional detectors, achieving successful applications in production with wide detection range and good photostability.