Cu-Ag@ZIF-8 film for SERS detection of gaseous molecule

Surface-enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) has emerged as a powerful and sensitive technique for the detection of various molecules, including gaseous analytes. However, the development of efficient, stable, and reusable SERS substrates for gaseous molecule remains a challenge. This work introduces a novel Cu-Ag@ZIF-8 film for SERS detection of gaseous molecule, which consists of Ag nanoparticles (AgNPs) core and ZIF-8 porous shell on Cu foils. With strong enhancement of electromagnetic field by AgNPs core and effective caption of gaseous molecule by ZIF-8 porous shell, this substrate exhibits good SERS performance of p-aminothiophenol (PATP) and 4-mercaptophenol (DP) gaseous molecules, whose limit of detection (LOD) could reach 9.12 × 10−10 M and 9.91 × 10−9 M, respectively. Furthermore, the detection of gaseous benzaldehyde diffused by oil paint is explored by this developed SERS substrate for application. To achieve accurate identification of harmful gaseous molecule in complex volatile organic compounds (VOC), the deep learning (DL) approach is performed based on SERS spectra obtained from this Cu-Ag@ZIF-8 film. Our results demonstrate that the identification of gaseous benzaldehyde in VOC diffused from commercial oil paint has a high accuracy at 97.7% with the help of ANN algorithms, which points out the Cu-Ag@ZIF-8 film has good performance and huge potential for SERS detection of gaseous molecule.