Advanced Functional Electroactive and Photoactive Materials for Monitoring the Environmental Pollutants

Functional materials with attractive electronic and photoelectronic properties show great promise in various fields. In recent decades, tremendous research efforts have been devoted to the design of photoactive and electroactive materials for qualitative and quantitative analysis of environmental pollutants. This review gives a concise overview on the fundamentals and recent research progress of functional material-based electrochemical and photoelectrochemical technology for environmental pollutant monitoring. The rational design of functional photoactive and electroactive materials with promoted electrochemical properties and basic signaling strategies for electrochemical and photoelectrochemical sensors are presented. Based on these insights, very recent achievements for electrochemical and photoelectrochemical environmental pollutant sensors are summarized from the viewpoint of various functional materials. At last, critical challenges and future research perspectives in this field are proposed and discussed to provide a backdrop for future research.