Fluorescent Porous Organic Frameworks Containing Molecular Rotors for Size-Selective Recognition

Fluorescent porous materials have been under intensive investigation recently, because of their wide applications in molecular recognition and chemical sensing. However, it is a great challenge to achieve size selectivity and sensing linearity for molecular recognition. Herein, we report a series of porous organic frameworks (POFs) containing flexible tetraphenylethylene (TPE) moieties as molecular rotors with responsive fluorescent behavior. These fluorescent POFs exhibit size-selective turn-on fluorescence for the effective chemical sensing of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which can be attributed to the different degrees of motion restriction of flexible TPE rotors by various VOCs, leading to the partially freezing of rotors in more fluorescent conformations. Significantly, a linear aggregation-induced emission (AIE) relationship is observed between the fluorescent POFs and the VOCs over a wide range of concentrations, which is highly beneficial for quantitative sensing applications. The gas-phase detection of arene vapors using POFs is also proven with unprecedentedly high sensitivity, selectively, and recyclability. The mechanism of responsive fluorescence in POFs is further investigated using molecular simulations and density functional theory (DFT) calculations.