This review highlights the emerging impacts of ionic liquids on eco-environmental safety and human health, which will accelerate our understanding of the safety issues of ionic liquids and serve as a guideline for the design of the next generation of ionic liquids.

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Selective gas sensing is of great importance for applications in health, safety, military, industry and environment. Many man-made and naturally occurring volatile organic compounds (VOCs) can harmfully affect human health or cause impairment to the environment. Gas analysis based on different principles has been developed to convert gaseous analytes into readable output signals. However, gas sensors such as metal-oxide semiconductors suffer from high operating temperatures that are impractical and therefore have limited its applications. The cost-effective quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) device represents an excellent platform if sensitive, selective and versatile sensing materials were available. Recent advances in affinity ionic liquids (AILs) have led them to incorporation with QCM to be highly sensitive for real-time detection of target gases at ambient temperature. The tailorable functional groups in AIL structures allow for chemoselective reaction with target analytes for single digit parts-per-billion detection on mass-sensitive QCM. This structural diversity makes AILs promising for the creation of a library of chemical sensor arrays that could be designed to efficiently detect gas mixtures simultaneously as a potential electronic in future. This review first provides brief introduction to some conventional gas sensing technologies and then delivers the latest results on our development of chemoselective AIL-on-QCM methods.

Reaction-based, sensitive sensing of aldehyde and ketone gases in real time was effectively achieved on QCM chips thin-coated with silver ionic liquids and , respectively. The method platform developed in this work involves straightforward synthesis of functional silver ionic liquids in water, and is label-free and highly chemoselective with superior gas reactivity for and and, most significantly, totally insensitive to moisture.