Facile, green, and low-cost synthesis of water-stable Ln-MOFs toward X-ray imaging

X-ray imaging demonstrates tremendous application potential in medical diagnosis, security screening and other relevant fields. As core functional materials for X-ray imaging, recent scintillators generally suffer from complicated fabrication processes, environmentally unfriendly or energy-intensive experimental procedures, and insufficient environmental stability. Herein, we used a facile, green, and low-cost synthetic method to construct water-stable lanthanide MOFs based scintillators (named Ln-BTC) toward underwater X-ray imaging. Tunable photoluminescence and X-ray excited luminescence can be realized in Ln-BTC by regulating the doping ratios of Tb 3+ and Eu 3+ ions. Tb-BTC preserves identical crystal structure and optical properties after 20-times and 50-times raw-material scale-up. It shows good radio-luminescent properties, including high relative light yield (max ∼ 18,400 photons MeV −1 ) and excellent linear X-ray response ( R 2  = 0.99). Besides, it presents good underwater irradiation stability (intensity > 84% after X-ray irradiation with total dose up to 215 Gy air ) and no significant structural degradation occurs after 20 days of storage in air and municipal water. MOFs-based mixed matrix membranes display good spatial resolution for underwater radio-imaging (max ∼16 lp mm −1 ). This work provides effective methods for the development of underwater X-ray imaging.