Water-dispersible X-ray scintillators enabling coating and blending with polymer materials for multiple applications
Hailei Zhang, Bo Zhang, Chongyang Cai, Kaiming Zhang, Yu Wang, Yuan Wang, Yanmin Yang, Yonggang Wu, Xinwu Ba, Richard Hoogenboom
Abstract
Abstract Developing X-ray scintillators that are water-dispersible, compatible with polymeric matrices, and processable to flexible substrates is an important challenge. Herein, Tb 3+ -doped Na 5 Lu 9 F 32 is introduced as an X-ray scintillating material with steady-state X-ray light yields of 15,800 photons MeV −1 , which is generated as nanocrystals on halloysite nanotubes. The obtained product exhibits good water-dispersibility and highly sensitive luminescence to X-rays. It is deposited onto a polyurethane foam to afford a composite foam material with dose-dependent radioluminescence. Moreover, the product is dispersed into polymer matrixes in aqueous solution to prepare rigid or flexible scintillator screen for X-ray imaging. As a third example, it is incorporated multilayer hydrogels for information camouflage and multilevel encryption. Encrypted information can be recognized only by X-ray irradiation, while the false information is read out under UV light. Altogether, we demonstrate that the water-dispersible scintillators are highly promising for aqueous processing of radioluminescent, X-ray imaging, and information encrypting materials.