Rapid, accurate, and intuitive detection of unknown liquids is greatly important for various fields such as food and drink safety, management of chemical hazards, manufacturing process monitoring, and so on. Here, we demonstrate a highly responsive and selective transparency-switching medium for on-site, visual identification of various liquids. The light scattering–based sensing medium, which is designed to be composed of polymeric interphase voids and hollow nanoparticles, provides an extremely large transmittance window (>95%) with outstanding selectivity and versatility. This sensing medium features ternary transparency states (transparent, semitransparent, and opaque) when immersed in liquids depending on liquid-polymer interactions and diffusion kinetics. Several different types of these transparency-changing media can be configured into an arrayed platform to discriminate a wide variety of liquids and also quantify their mixing ratios. The outstanding versatility and user friendliness of the sensing platform allow the development of a practical tool for discrimination of diverse organic liquids.

中文翻译：

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具有三元透明状态的微细胞传感介质，用于快速直观地识别未知液体

快速、准确和直观地检测未知液体对于食品和饮料安全、化学危害管理、制造过程监控等各个领域都非常重要。在这里，我们展示了一种用于现场视觉识别各种液体的高响应性和选择性透明切换介质。基于光散射的传感介质设计为由聚合物界面空隙和中空纳米颗粒组成，提供了极大的透射率窗口（>95%），具有出色的选择性和多功能性。这种传感介质在浸入液体时具有三元透明状态（透明、半透明和不透明），具体取决于液体-聚合物相互作用和扩散动力学。几种不同类型的这些改变透明度的介质可以配置成一个阵列平台，以区分各种液体并量化它们的混合比。传感平台出色的多功能性和用户友好性允许开发用于区分各种有机液体的实用工具。