Smart Membranes for Simultaneous Chemical Sensing, Filtration, and Detoxification

Ensuring ubiquitous access to clean and water is paramount for protecting human health and promoting climate equity. Aside from drinking water protection and security, inadequate access to clean air poses one of the greatest threats to human health in the coming century. Air pollution represents the fourth greatest risk factor for human health worldwide, only trailing factors based on genetics or lifestyle choices, such as high blood pressure, diet, and smoking. Among the list of air pollutants outlined by the Environmental Protection Agency, toxic gases such as SO₂, H₂S, NO_x, NH₃, and CO stand out as particularly hazardous with permissible exposure limits at part-per-million concentrations that can lead to acute toxicity effects, as well as chronic issues stemming from prolonged low dose exposure. While some of these gases originate from anthropogenic sources, such as the burning of fossil fuels and industrial processes, some of them can also be generated from natural sources, like wildfires and volcanic eruptions, making the detection and protection from toxic gas emissions a complex task.

Smart membranes—materials with tailored properties capable of responding to external stimuli—hold tremendous promise in environmental remediation and the design of personal protective equipment through combined capabilities in separating and detecting specific gases. This presentation will highlight the potential utility of conductive layered 2D metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) on textiles to serve as multifunctional materials to achieve simultaneous chemical detection and filtration of toxic pollutants. An emphasis will be placed on the fundamental understanding and molecular design of modular structure–property relationships within this class of MOFs. The use of these materials paves the way towards scalable smart membrane design that merges ultrasensitive, selective, and low-power sensor technology with scalable methods for high-performance fabrication strategies.