Liquid crystal design method could speed development of cheap chemical sensors

University of Wisconsin-Madison chemical engineers have developed a new way to create inexpensive chemical sensors for detecting explosives, industrial pollutants or even the chemical markers of disease in a patient's breath. Manos Mavrikakis and Nicholas L. Abbott , UW?Madison professors of chemical and biological engineering, combined their expertise in computational chemistry and liquid crystals to turn a sensor Abbott built to detect a molecular mimic of deadly sarin gas into a roadmap for tuning similar sensors to flag other dangerous or important chemicals. 'We've established a new framework,' says Mavrikakis. The researchers described the material Wednesday (Nov. Their framework is a new approach for optimizing the components - similar to those found in flat-panel TVs - of a liquid-crystal-based sensor: metal cations (positively charged ions), salt anions, solvents and molecules that form liquid crystals. The research leveraged Mavrikakis' computational chemistry expertise and Abbott's experimental expertise, cycling between quantum chemical modeling and the laboratory experiments to optimize the sensor components for a targeted substance. By tweaking each of the individual components in turn, they identified an ideal configuration that specifically responded to the molecule they wanted to sense, called the analyte.