Flexible Cellulose/ZIF-8/Ag SERS chips for direct solvent-free detection of styrene vapor toward rapid occupational monitoring

Styrene is one of the most important volatile organic compounds (VOCs) used extensively in polymer and composite manufacturing, where occupational exposure occurs predominantly through inhalation of its vapor. Although surface-enhanced Raman spectroscpoy (SERS) offers exceptional sensitivity for molecular analysis, its application to vapor-phase detection remains challenging because volatile molecules are difficult to efficiently accumulate at plasmonically active sites. Consequently, conventional styrene vapor analysis generally relies on multistep workflows involving vapor sampling and analyte desorption prior to analysis. Herein, we report a flexible Cellulose/ZIF-8/Ag SERS chip combined with a simple attach-and-capture strategy for direct solvent-free detection of styrene vapor. By attaching the SERS sensing chip to the inner surface of a vial cap, vapor sampling and SERS detection were integrated into a single workflow without additional sample pretreatment. The developed SERS platform achieved a detection limit of 240 mg/m 3 , below current occupational exposure limits for styrene, together with excellent analytical reliability (RSDs of 1.89% within a single chip and 5.29% between independently fabricated chips), good selectivity for styrene, stable performance under high relative humidity, robust SERS activity after repeated mechanical deformation, and outstanding post-sampling signal stability. By separating passive vapor accumulation from subsequent spectroscopic analysis, the attach-and-capture configuration enables the chip to be deployed in advance and retrieved for rapid on-demand SERS readout, offering operational flexibility beyond conventional multistep sampling workflows. These findings establish the proposed attach-and-capture strategy as a practical analytical workflow for integrating vapor sampling and SERS detection into a single solvent-free operation for rapid occupational monitoring of styrene vapor. Download: Download high-res image (171KB) Download: Download full-size image