Tag Archives: Drexel University

MXene-coated yarn for wearable electronics

There’s been a lot of talk about wearable electronics, specifically e-textiles, but nothing seems to have entered the marketplace. Scaling up your lab discoveries for industrial production can be quite problematic. From an October 10, 2019 news item on ScienceDaily,

Producing functional fabrics that perform all the functions we want, while retaining the characteristics of fabric we’re accustomed to is no easy task.

Two groups of researchers at Drexel University — one, who is leading the development of industrial functional fabric production techniques, and the other, a pioneer in the study and application of one of the strongest, most electrically conductive super materials in use today — believe they have a solution.

They’ve improved a basic element of textiles: yarn. By adding technical capabilities to the fibers that give textiles their character, fit and feel, the team has shown that it can knit new functionality into fabrics without limiting their wearability.

An October 10, 2019 Drexel University news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, details the proposed solution (pun! as you’ll see in the video following this excerpt),

In a paper recently published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, the researchers, led by Yury Gogotsi, PhD, Distinguished University and Bach professor in Drexel’s College of Engineering, and Genevieve Dion, an associate professor in Westphal College of Media Arts & Design and director of Drexel’s Center for Functional Fabrics, showed that they can create a highly conductive, durable yarn by coating standard cellulose-based yarns with a type of conductive two-dimensional material called MXene.

Hitting snags

“Current wearables utilize conventional batteries, which are bulky and uncomfortable, and can impose design limitations to the final product,” they write. “Therefore, the development of flexible, electrochemically and electromechanically active yarns, which can be engineered and knitted into full fabrics provide new and practical insights for the scalable production of textile-based devices.”

The team reported that its conductive yarn packs more conductive material into the fibers and can be knitted by a standard industrial knitting machine to produce a textile with top-notch electrical performance capabilities. This combination of ability and durability stands apart from the rest of the functional fabric field today.

Most attempts to turn textiles into wearable technology use stiff metallic fibers that alter the texture and physical behavior of the fabric. Other attempts to make conductive textiles using silver nanoparticles and graphene and other carbon materials raise environmental concerns and come up short on performance requirements. And the coating methods that are successfully able to apply enough material to a textile substrate to make it highly conductive also tend to make the yarns and fabrics too brittle to withstand normal wear and tear.

“Some of the biggest challenges in our field are developing innovative functional yarns at scale that are robust enough to be integrated into the textile manufacturing process and withstand washing,” Dion said. “We believe that demonstrating the manufacturability of any new conductive yarn during experimental stages is crucial. High electrical conductivity and electrochemical performance are important, but so are conductive yarns that can be produced by a simple and scalable process with suitable mechanical properties for textile integration. All must be taken into consideration for the successful development of the next-generation devices that can be worn like everyday garments.”

The winning combination

Dion has been a pioneer in the field of wearable technology, by drawing on her background on fashion and industrial design to produce new processes for creating fabrics with new technological capabilities. Her work has been recognized by the Department of Defense, which included Drexel, and Dion, in its Advanced Functional Fabrics of America effort to make the country a leader in the field.

She teamed with Gogotsi, who is a leading researcher in the area of two-dimensional conductive materials, to approach the challenge of making a conductive yarn that would hold up to knitting, wearing and washing.

Gogotsi’s group was part of the Drexel team that discovered highly conductive two-dimensional materials, called MXenes, in 2011 and have been exploring their exceptional properties and applications for them ever since. His group has shown that it can synthesize MXenes that mix with water to create inks and spray coatings without any additives or surfactants – a revelation that made them a natural candidate for making conductive yarn that could be used in functional fabrics. [Gogotsi’s work was featured here in a May 6, 2019 posting]

“Researchers have explored adding graphene and carbon nanotube coatings to yarn, our group has also looked at a number of carbon coatings in the past,” Gogotsi said. “But achieving the level of conductivity that we demonstrate with MXenes has not been possible until now. It is approaching the conductivity of silver nanowire-coated yarns, but the use of silver in the textile industry is severely limited due to its dissolution and harmful effect on the environment. Moreover, MXenes could be used to add electrical energy storage capability, sensing, electromagnetic interference shielding and many other useful properties to textiles.”

In its basic form, titanium carbide MXene looks like a black powder. But it is actually composed of flakes that are just a few atoms thick, which can be produced at various sizes. Larger flakes mean more surface area and greater conductivity, so the team found that it was possible to boost the performance of the yarn by infiltrating the individual fibers with smaller flakes and then coating the yarn itself with a layer of larger-flake MXene.

Putting it to the test

The team created the conductive yarns from three common, cellulose-based yarns: cotton, bamboo and linen. They applied the MXene material via dip-coating, which is a standard dyeing method, before testing them by knitting full fabrics on an industrial knitting machine – the kind used to make most of the sweaters and scarves you’ll see this fall.

Each type of yarn was knit into three different fabric swatches using three different stitch patterns – single jersey, half gauge and interlock – to ensure that they are durable enough to hold up in any textile from a tightly knit sweater to a loose-knit scarf.

“The ability to knit MXene-coated cellulose-based yarns with different stitch patterns allowed us to control the fabric properties, such as porosity and thickness for various applications,” the researchers write.

To put the new threads to the test in a technological application, the team knitted some touch-sensitive textiles – the sort that are being explored by Levi’s and Yves Saint Laurent as part of Google’s Project Jacquard.

Not only did the MXene-based conductive yarns hold up against the wear and tear of the industrial knitting machines, but the fabrics produced survived a battery of tests to prove its durability. Tugging, twisting, bending and – most importantly – washing, did not diminish the touch-sensing abilities of the yarn, the team reported – even after dozens of trips through the spin cycle.

Pushing forward

But the researchers suggest that the ultimate advantage of using MXene-coated conductive yarns to produce these special textiles is that all of the functionality can be seamlessly integrated into the textiles. So instead of having to add an external battery to power the wearable device, or wirelessly connect it to your smartphone, these energy storage devices and antennas would be made of fabric as well – an integration that, though literally seamed, is a much smoother way to incorporate the technology.

“Electrically conducting yarns are quintessential for wearable applications because they can be engineered to perform specific functions in a wide array of technologies,” they write.

Using conductive yarns also means that a wider variety of technological customization and innovations are possible via the knitting process. For example, “the performance of the knitted pressure sensor can be further improved in the future by changing the yarn type, stitch pattern, active material loading and the dielectric layer to result in higher capacitance changes,” according to the authors.

Dion’s team at the Center for Functional Fabrics is already putting this development to the test in a number of projects, including a collaboration with textile manufacturer Apex Mills – one of the leading producers of material for car seats and interiors. And Gogotsi suggests the next step for this work will be tuning the coating process to add just the right amount of conductive MXene material to the yarn for specific uses.

“With this MXene yarn, so many applications are possible,” Gogotsi said. “You can think about making car seats with it so the car knows the size and weight of the passenger to optimize safety settings; textile pressure sensors could be in sports apparel to monitor performance, or woven into carpets to help connected houses discern how many people are home – your imagination is the limit.”

Researchers have produced a video about their work,

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Knittable and Washable Multifunctional MXene‐Coated Cellulose Yarns by Simge Uzun, Shayan Seyedin, Amy L. Stoltzfus, Ariana S. Levitt, Mohamed Alhabeb, Mark Anayee, Christina J. Strobel, Joselito M. Razal, Genevieve Dion, Yury Gogotsi. Advanced Functional Materials DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.201905015 First published: 05 September 2019

This paper is behind a paywall.

Cannibalisitic nanostructures

I think this form of ‘cannibalism’ could also be described as a form of ‘self-assembly’. That said, here is an August 31, 2018 news item on ScienceDaily announcing ‘cannibalistic’ materials,

Scientists at the [US] Department of Energy’s [DOE] Oak Ridge National Laboratory [ORNL] induced a two-dimensional material to cannibalize itself for atomic “building blocks” from which stable structures formed.

The findings, reported in Nature Communications, provide insights that may improve design of 2D materials for fast-charging energy-storage and electronic devices.

An August 31, 2018 DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides more detail (Note: Links have been removed),

“Under our experimental conditions, titanium and carbon atoms can spontaneously form an atomically thin layer of 2D transition-metal carbide, which was never observed before,” said Xiahan Sang of ORNL.

He and ORNL’s Raymond Unocic led a team that performed in situ experiments using state-of-the-art scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), combined with theory-based simulations, to reveal the mechanism’s atomistic details.

“This study is about determining the atomic-level mechanisms and kinetics that are responsible for forming new structures of a 2D transition-metal carbide such that new synthesis methods can be realized for this class of materials,” Unocic added.

The starting material was a 2D ceramic called a MXene (pronounced “max een”). Unlike most ceramics, MXenes are good electrical conductors because they are made from alternating atomic layers of carbon or nitrogen sandwiched within transition metals like titanium.

The research was a project of the Fluid Interface Reactions, Structures and Transport (FIRST) Center, a DOE Energy Frontier Research Center that explores fluid–solid interface reactions that have consequences for energy transport in everyday applications. Scientists conducted experiments to synthesize and characterize advanced materials and performed theory and simulation work to explain observed structural and functional properties of the materials. New knowledge from FIRST projects provides guideposts for future studies.

The high-quality material used in these experiments was synthesized by Drexel University scientists, in the form of five-ply single-crystal monolayer flakes of MXene. The flakes were taken from a parent crystal called “MAX,” which contains a transition metal denoted by “M”; an element such as aluminum or silicon, denoted by “A”; and either a carbon or nitrogen atom, denoted by “X.” The researchers used an acidic solution to etch out the monoatomic aluminum layers, exfoliate the material and delaminate it into individual monolayers of a titanium carbide MXene (Ti3C2).

The ORNL scientists suspended a large MXene flake on a heating chip with holes drilled in it so no support material, or substrate, interfered with the flake. Under vacuum, the suspended flake was exposed to heat and irradiated with an electron beam to clean the MXene surface and fully expose the layer of titanium atoms.

MXenes are typically inert because their surfaces are covered with protective functional groups—oxygen, hydrogen and fluorine atoms that remain after acid exfoliation. After protective groups are removed, the remaining material activates. Atomic-scale defects—“vacancies” created when titanium atoms are removed during etching—are exposed on the outer ply of the monolayer. “These atomic vacancies are good initiation sites,” Sang said. “It’s favorable for titanium and carbon atoms to move from defective sites to the surface.” In an area with a defect, a pore may form when atoms migrate.

“Once those functional groups are gone, now you’re left with a bare titanium layer (and underneath, alternating carbon, titanium, carbon, titanium) that’s free to reconstruct and form new structures on top of existing structures,” Sang said.

High-resolution STEM imaging proved that atoms moved from one part of the material to another to build structures. Because the material feeds on itself, the growth mechanism is cannibalistic.

“The growth mechanism is completely supported by density functional theory and reactive molecular dynamics simulations, thus opening up future possibilities to use these theory tools to determine the experimental parameters required for synthesizing specific defect structures,” said Adri van Duin of Penn State [Pennsylvania State University].

Most of the time, only one additional layer [of carbon and titanium] grew on a surface. The material changed as atoms built new layers. Ti3C2 turned into Ti4C3, for example.

“These materials are efficient at ionic transport, which lends itself well to battery and supercapacitor applications,” Unocic said. “How does ionic transport change when we add more layers to nanometer-thin MXene sheets?” This question may spur future studies.

“Because MXenes containing molybdenum, niobium, vanadium, tantalum, hafnium, chromium and other metals are available, there are opportunities to make a variety of new structures containing more than three or four metal atoms in cross-section (the current limit for MXenes produced from MAX phases),” Yury Gogotsi of Drexel University added. “Those materials may show different useful properties and create an array of 2D building blocks for advancing technology.”

At ORNL’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS), Yu Xie, Weiwei Sun and Paul Kent performed first-principles theory calculations to explain why these materials grew layer by layer instead of forming alternate structures, such as squares. Xufan Li and Kai Xiao helped understand the growth mechanism, which minimizes surface energy to stabilize atomic configurations. Penn State scientists conducted large-scale dynamical reactive force field simulations showing how atoms rearranged on surfaces, confirming defect structures and their evolution as observed in experiments.

The researchers hope the new knowledge will help others grow advanced materials and generate useful nanoscale structures.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

In situ atomistic insight into the growth mechanisms of single layer 2D transition metal carbides by Xiahan Sang, Yu Xie, Dundar E. Yilmaz, Roghayyeh Lotfi, Mohamed Alhabeb, Alireza Ostadhossein, Babak Anasori, Weiwei Sun, Xufan Li, Kai Xiao, Paul R. C. Kent, Adri C. T. van Duin, Yury Gogotsi, & Raymond R. Unocic. Nature Communicationsvolume 9, Article number: 2266 (2018) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-04610-0 Published 11 June 2018

This paper is open access.

Nanostructured materials and radiation

If you’re planning on using nanostructured materials in a nuclear facility, you might want to check out this work (from a June 8, 2018 Purdue University (Indiana, US) news release by Brian L. Huchel,

A professor in the Purdue College of Engineering examined the potential use of various materials in nuclear reactors in an extensive review article in the journal Progress in Materials Science.

The article, titled “Radiation Damage in Nanostructured Materials,” was led by Xinghang Zhang, a professor of materials engineering. It will be published in the July issue of the journal.

Zhang said there is a significant demand for advanced materials that can survive high temperature and high doses of radiation. These materials contain significant amount of internal changes, called defect sinks, which are too small to be seen with the naked eye, but may form the next generation of materials used in nuclear reactors.

“Nanostructured materials with abundant internal defect sinks are promising as these materials have shown significantly improved radiation tolerance,” he said. “However, there are many challenges and fundamental science questions that remain to be solved before these materials can have applications in advanced nuclear reactors.”

The 100-page article, which took two years to write, focuses on metallic materials and metal-ceramic compounds and reviews types of internal material defects on the reduction of radiation damage in nanostructured materials.

Under the extreme radiation conditions, a large number of defects and their clusters are generated inside materials, and such significant microstructure damage often leads to degradation of the mechanical and physical properties of the materials

The article discusses the usage of a combination of defect sink networks to collaboratively improve the radiation tolerance of nanomaterials, while pointing out the need to improve the thermal and radiation stabilities of the defect sinks.

“The field of radiation damage in nanostructured materials is an exciting and rapidly evolving arena, enriched with challenges and opportunities,” Zhang said. “The integration of extensive research effort, resources and expertise in various fields may eventually lead to the design of advanced nanomaterials with unprecedented radiation tolerance.”

Jin Li, co-author of the review article and a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Materials Engineering, said researchers with different expertise worked collaboratively on the article, which contains more than 100 pages, 100 figures and 700 references.

The team involved in the research article included researchers from Purdue, Texas A&M University, Drexel University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and China University of Petroleum-Beijing, as well as Sandia National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory.

Here’s an image illustrating the work,

Various imperfections in nanostructures, call defect sinks, can enhance the material’s tolerance to radiation. (Photo/Xinghang Zhang)

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Radiation damage in nanostructured materials by Xinghang Zhang, Khalid Hattar, Youxing Chen, Lin Shao, Jin Li, Cheng Sun, Kaiyuan Yu, Nan Li, Mitra L.Taheri, Haiyan Wang, Jian Wang, Michael Nastasi. Progress in Materials Science Volume 96, July 2018, Pages 217-321 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pmatsci.2018.03.002

This paper is behind a paywall.

ht/ to June 8, 2018 Nanowerk news item.

Want better energy storage materials? Add salt

An April 22, 2016 news item on Nanowerk reveals a secret to better energy storage materials,

The secret to making the best energy storage materials is growing them with as much surface area as possible. Like baking, it requires just the right mixture of ingredients prepared in a specific amount and order at just the right temperature to produce a thin sheet of material with the perfect chemical consistency to be useful for storing energy. A team of researchers from Drexel University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST) and Tsinghua University recently discovered a way to improve the recipe and make the resulting materials bigger and better and soaking up energy — the secret? Just add salt.

An April 22, 2016 Drexel University news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides more detail,

The team’s findings, which were recently published in the journal Nature Communications, show that using salt crystals as a template to grow thin sheets of conductive metal oxides make the materials turn out larger and more chemically pure — which makes them better suited for gathering ions and storing energy.

“The challenge of producing a metal oxide that reaches theoretical performance values is that the methods for making it inherently limit its size and often foul its chemical purity, which makes it fall short of predicted energy storage performance,” said Jun Zhou, a professor at HUST’s Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics and an author of the research. Our research reveals a way to grow stable oxide sheets with less fouling that are on the order of several hundreds of times larger than the ones that are currently being fabricated.”

In an energy storage device — a battery or a capacitor, for example — energy is contained in the chemical transfer of ions from an electrolyte solution to thin layers of conductive materials. As these devices evolve they’re becoming smaller and capable of holding an electric charge for longer periods of time without needing a recharge. The reason for their improvement is that researchers are fabricating materials that are better equipped, structurally and chemically, for collecting and disbursing ions.

In theory, the best materials for the job should be thin sheets of metal oxides, because their chemical structure and high surface area makes it easy for ions to attach — which is how energy storage occurs. But the metal oxide sheets that have been fabricated in labs thus far have fallen well short of their theoretical capabilities.

According to Zhou, Tang [?] and the team from HUST, the problem lies in the process of making the nanosheets — which involves either a deposition from gas or a chemical etching — often leaves trace chemical residues that contaminate the material and prevent ions from bonding to it. In addition, the materials made in this way are often just a few square micrometers in size.

Using salt crystals as a substrate for growing the crystals lets them spread out and form a larger sheet of oxide material. Think of it like making a waffle by dripping batter into a pan versus pouring it into a big waffle iron; the key to getting a big, sturdy product is getting the solution — be it batter, or chemical compound — to spread evenly over the template and stabilize in a uniform way.

“This method of synthesis, called ‘templating’ — where we use a sacrificial material as a substrate for growing a crystal — is used to create a certain shape or structure,” said Yury Gogotsi, PhD, University and Trustee Chair professor in Drexel’s College of Engineering and head of the A.J. Drexel Nanomaterials Institute, who was an author of the paper. “The trick in this work is that the crystal structure of salt must match the crystal structure of the oxide, otherwise it will form an amorphous film of oxide rather than a thing, strong and stable nanocrystal. This is the key finding of our research — it means that different salts must be used to produce different oxides.”

Researchers have used a variety of chemicals, compounds, polymers and objects as growth templates for nanomaterials. But this discovery shows the importance of matching a template to the structure of the material being grown. Salt crystals turn out to be the perfect substrate for growing oxide sheets of magnesium, molybdenum and tungsten.

The precursor solution coats the sides of the salt crystals as the oxides begin to form. After they’ve solidified, the salt is dissolved in a wash, leaving nanometer-thin two-dimensional sheets that formed on the sides of the salt crystal — and little trace of any contaminants that might hinder their energy storage performance. By making oxide nanosheets in this way, the only factors that limit their growth is the size of the salt crystal and the amount of precursor solution used.

“Lateral growth of the 2D oxides was guided by salt crystal geometry and promoted by lattice matching and the thickness was restrained by the raw material supply. The dimensions of the salt crystals are tens of micrometers and guide the growth of the 2D oxide to a similar size,” the researchers write in the paper. “On the basis of the naturally non-layered crystal structures of these oxides, the suitability of salt-assisted templating as a general method for synthesis of 2D oxides has been convincingly demonstrated.”

As predicted, the larger size of the oxide sheets also equated to a greater ability to collect and disburse ions from an electrolyte solution — the ultimate test for its potential to be used in energy storage devices. Results reported in the paper suggest that use of these materials may help in creating an aluminum-ion battery that could store more charge than the best lithium-ion batteries found in laptops and mobile devices today.

Gogotsi, along with his students in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, has been collaborating with Huazhong University of Science and Technology since 2012 to explore a wide variety of materials for energy storage application. The lead author of the Nature Communications article, Xu Xiao, and co-author Tiangi Li, both Zhou’s doctoral students, came to Drexel as exchange students to learn about the University’s supercapacitor research. Those visits started a collaboration, which was supported by Gogotsi’s annual trips to HUST. While the partnership has already yielded five joint publications, Gogotsi speculates that this work is only beginning.

“The most significant result of this work thus far is that we’ve demonstrated the ability to generate high-quality 2D oxides with various compositions,” Gogotsi said. “I can certainly see expanding this approach to other oxides that may offer attractive properties for electrical energy storage, water desalination membranes, photocatalysis and other applications.”

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Scalable salt-templated synthesis of two-dimensional transition metal oxides by Xu Xiao, Huaibing Song, Shizhe Lin, Ying Zhou, Xiaojun Zhan, Zhimi Hu, Qi Zhang, Jiyu Sun, Bo Yang, Tianqi Li, Liying Jiao, Jun Zhou, Jiang Tang, & Yury Gogotsi. Nature Communications 7, Article number:  11296 doi:10.1038/ncomms11296 Published 22 April 2016

This is an open access paper.

Boron nitride sponges for oil spill cleanups

The best part of the news is that the scientists are ready to test these sponges in industrial trials but first here’s why the Australians are so excited about the work from a Dec. 1, 2015 news item on Azonano,

Deakin University scientists have manufactured a revolutionary material that can clean up oil spills, which could save the earth from potential future disasters such as any repeat of the 2010 Gulf Coast BP disaster that wreaked environmental havoc and cost a reported $40 billion.

The major breakthrough material, which literally absorbs the oil like a sponge, is the result of support from the Australian Research Council and is now ready to be trialled by industry after two years of refinement in the laboratory at Deakin’s Institute for Frontier Materials (IFM).

Alfred Deakin Professor Ying (Ian) Chen, the lead author on a paper which outlines the team’s breakthrough in today’s edition of Nature Communications, said the material was the most exciting advancement in oil spill clean-up technology in decades.

Oil spills are a global problem and wreak havoc on our aquatic ecosystems, not to mention cost billions of dollars in damage.

“Everyone remembers the Gulf Coast disaster, but here in Australia they are a regular problem, and not just in our waters. Oil spills from trucks and other vehicles can close freeways for an entire day, again amounting to large economic losses. Professor Chen

But current methods of cleaning up oil spills are inefficient and unsophisticated, taking too long, causing ongoing and expensive damage, which is why the development of our technology was supported by the Australian Research Council.

“We are so excited to have finally got to this stage after two years of trying to work out how to turn what we knew was a good material into something that could be practically used.

A Nov. 30, 2015 Deakin University media release, which originated the news item, provides some technical details,

“In 2013 we developed the first stage of the material, but it was simply a powder. This powder had absorption capabilities, but you cannot simply throw powder onto oil – you need to be able to bind that powder into a sponge so that we can soak the oil up, and also separate it from water.”

The lead author on the paper, IFM scientist Dr Weiwei Lei,) an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Awardee, said turning the powder into a sponge was a big challenge.

“But we have finally done it by developing a new production technique,” Dr Lei said.

“The ground-breaking material is called a boron nitride nanosheet, which is made up of flakes which are just several nanometers (one billionth of a meter) in thickness with tiny holes which can increase its surface area per gram to effectively the size of 5.5 tennis courts.”

The research team, which included scientists from Drexel University, Philadelphia, and Missouri University of Science and Technology, started with boron nitride powder known as “white graphite” and broke it into atomically thin sheets that were used to make a sponge.

“The pores in the nanosheets provide the surface area to absorb oils and organic solvents up to 33 times its own weight,” Dr Lei said.

Professor Yury Gogotsi from Drexel University said boron nitride nanosheets did not burn, could withstand flame, and be used in flexible and transparent electrical and heat insulation, as well as many other applications.

“We are delighted that support from the Australian Research Council allowed us to participate in this interesting study and we could help our IFM colleagues to model and better understand this wonderful material, ” Professor Gogotsi said.

Professor Vadym Mochalin from Missouri University of Science and Technology said the mechanochemical technique developed meant it was possible to produce high-concentration stable aqueous colloidal solutions of boron nitride sheets, which could then be transformed into the ultralight porous aerogels and membranes for oil clean-up.

“The use of computational modelling helped us to understand the intimate details of this novel mechanochemical exfoliation process. It is a nice illustration of the power, which combined experimental plus modelling approach offers researchers nowadays.”

The research team is now ready to have their “sponge” trialled by industry. [emphasis mine]

The nanotechnology team at IFM has been working on boron nitride nanomaterials for two decades and is an internationally recognised leader in boron nitride nanotubes and nanosheets.

There was at least one other team working on  sponges, all these are composed of carbon nanotubes, for oil spills (mentioned in my April 17, 2012 posting) but they don’t seem to have been able to get their work out of the laboratory.

Here’s a link to and a citation for boron nitride sponges,

Boron nitride colloidal solutions, ultralight aerogels and freestanding membranes through one-step exfoliation and functionalization by Weiwei Lei, Vadym N. Mochalin, Dan Liu, Si Qin, Yury Gogotsi, & Ying Chen. Nature Communications 6, Article number: 8849 doi:10.1038/ncomms9849 Published 27 November 2015

This is an open access paper.

Should October 2013 be called ‘the month of graphene’?

Since the Oct. 10-11, 2013 Graphene Flagship (1B Euros investment) launch, mentioned in my preview Oct. 7, 2013 posting, there’ve been a flurry of graphene-themed news items both on this blog and elsewhere and I’ve decided to offer a brief roundup what I’ve found elsewhere.

Dexter Johnson offers a commentary in the pithily titled, Europe Invests €1 Billion to Become “Graphene Valley,” an Oct. 15, 2013 posting on his Nanoclast blog (on the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] website) Note: Links have been removed,

The initiative has been dubbed “The Graphene Flagship,” and apparently it is the first in a number of €1 billion, 10-year plans the EC is planning to launch. The graphene version will bring together 76 academic institutions and industrial groups from 17 European countries, with an initial 30-month-budget of €54M ($73 million).

Graphene research is still struggling to find any kind of applications that will really take hold, and many don’t expect it will have a commercial impact until 2020. What’s more, manufacturing methods are still undeveloped. So it would appear that a 10-year plan is aimed at the academic institutions that form the backbone of this initiative rather than commercial enterprises.

Just from a political standpoint the choice of Chalmers University in Sweden as the base of operations for the Graphene Flagship is an intriguing choice. …

I have to agree with Dexter that choosing Chalmers University over the University of Manchester where graphene was first isolated is unexpected. As a companion piece to reading Dexter’s posting in its entirety and which features a video from the flagship launch, you might want to try this Oct. 15, 2013 article by Koen Mortelmans for Youris (h/t Oct. 15, 2013 news item on Nanowerk),

Andre Konstantin Geim is the only person who ever received both a Nobel and an Ig Nobel. He was born in 1958 in Russia, and is a Dutch-British physicist with German, Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian roots. “Having lived and worked in several European countries, I consider myself European. I don’t believe that any further taxonomy is necessary,” he says. He is now a physics professor at the University of Manchester. …

He shared the Noble [Nobel] Prize in 2010 with Konstantin Novoselov for their work on graphene. It was following on their isolation of microscope visible grapheme flakes that the worldwide research towards practical applications of graphene took off.  “We did not invent graphene,” Geim says, “we only saw what was laid up for five hundred year under our noses.”

Geim and Novoselov are often thought to have succeeded in separating graphene from graphite by peeling it off with ordinary duct tape until there only remained a layer. Graphene could then be observed with a microscope, because of the partial transparency of the material. That is, after dissolving the duct tape material in acetone, of course. That is also the story Geim himself likes to tell.

However, he did not use – as the urban myth goes – graphite from a common pencil. Instead, he used a carbon sample of extreme purity, specially imported. He also used ultrasound techniques. But, probably the urban legend will survive, as did Archimedes’ bath and Newtons apple. “It is nice to keep some of the magic,” is the expression Geim often uses when he does not want a nice story to be drowned in hard facts or when he wants to remain discrete about still incomplete, but promising research results.

Mortelmans’ article fills in some gaps for those not familiar with the graphene ‘origins’ story while Tim Harper’s July 22, 2012 posting on Cientifica’s (an emerging technologies consultancy where Harper is the CEO and founder) TNT blog offers an insight into Geim’s perspective on the race to commercialize graphene with a paraphrased quote for the title of Harper’s posting, “It’s a bit silly for society to throw a little bit of money at (graphene) and expect it to change the world.” (Note: Within this context, mention is made of the company’s graphene opportunities report.)

With all this excitement about graphene (and carbon generally), the magazine titled Carbon has just published a suggested nomenclature for 2D carbon forms such as graphene, graphane, etc., according to an Oct. 16, 2013 news item on Nanowerk (Note: A link has been removed),

There has been an intense research interest in all two-dimensional (2D) forms of carbon since Geim and Novoselov’s discovery of graphene in 2004. But as the number of such publications rise, so does the level of inconsistency in naming the material of interest. The isolated, single-atom-thick sheet universally referred to as “graphene” may have a clear definition, but when referring to related 2D sheet-like or flake-like carbon forms, many authors have simply defined their own terms to describe their product.

This has led to confusion within the literature, where terms are multiply-defined, or incorrectly used. The Editorial Board of Carbon has therefore published the first recommended nomenclature for 2D carbon forms (“All in the graphene family – A recommended nomenclature for two-dimensional carbon materials”).

This proposed nomenclature comes in the form of an editorial, from Carbon (Volume 65, December 2013, Pages 1–6),

All in the graphene family – A recommended nomenclature for two-dimensional carbon materials

  • Alberto Bianco
    CNRS, Institut de Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire, Immunopathologie et Chimie Thérapeutique, Strasbourg, France
  • Hui-Ming Cheng
    Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 72 Wenhua Road, Shenyang 110016, China
  • Toshiaki Enoki
    Department of Chemistry, Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan
  • Yury Gogotsi
    Materials Science and Engineering Department, A.J. Drexel Nanotechnology Institute, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
  • Robert H. Hurt
    Institute for Molecular and Nanoscale Innovation, School of Engineering, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA
  • Nikhil Koratkar
    Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering, The Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th Street, Troy, NY 12180, USA
  • Takashi Kyotani
    Institute of Multidisciplinary Research for Advanced Materials, Tohoku University, 2-1-1 Katahira, Aoba-ku, Sendai 980-8577, Japan
  • Marc Monthioux
    Centre d’Elaboration des Matériaux et d’Etudes Structurales (CEMES), UPR-8011 CNRS, Université de Toulouse, 29 Rue Jeanne Marvig, F-31055 Toulouse, France
  • Chong Rae Park
    Carbon Nanomaterials Design Laboratory, Global Research Laboratory, Research Institute of Advanced Materials, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul 151-744, Republic of Korea
  • Juan M.D. Tascon
    Instituto Nacional del Carbón, INCAR-CSIC, Apartado 73, 33080 Oviedo, Spain
  • Jin Zhang
    Center for Nanochemistry, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

This editorial is behind a paywall.

Voting opens today for online science video (and poster) competition

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has a special program to encourage both interdisciplinary work and communication with the public, the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program which is holding an online video (and poster) competition. From the May 22, 2012 news item on Nanowerk,

The 2012 IGERT Online Video and Poster Competition is showcasing the cutting-edge interdisciplinary research of 180 graduate-school students from 114 graduate programs funded by the National Science Foundation’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program. Through this competition, up-and-coming scientists use videos and posters to communicate their innovative, interdisciplinary research, which bridges traditional disciplines such as physics, engineering, nanotechnology, computer science, biology, and the social sciences to address complex challenges of our time. The online platform designed by TERC [Technical Education Research Centers] enables the public to view the videos and posters, ask the researchers questions, and vote for the Public Choice Award by “liking” their favorite presentations on Facebook.

The deadline for voting on the Public Choice Award is May 25, 2012 12 noon EDT. Winners will be announced June 1, 2012. I was unable to login directly at the IGERT website so found access through the Nanowerk links. Here’s one of the nanotechnology videos,

Here’s how the students, Kristy Jost and Carlos Perez from Drexel University (Pennsylania, US)  describe the work on the IGERT webpage hosting their video,

Energy Textiles: a Multidisciplinary Approach to Integrated Electronics in “Smart” Garments

Fashionable Technology is a multidisciplinary field of study, focusing on the fabrication of wearable electronics by combining fashion design techniques with advanced nanotechnology. Applications of fashionable technology range from wearable and soft bio-sensors to integrated circuitry that can monitor human vitals in hospitals, combat, or in space. Beyond the engineering perspective, the field has shown applicability in the aesthetic realm as a transformable means of expression on the body, including clothes that change color and shape while performing electronic functions similar to an iPhone. However, previous designers and researchers in the field of “smart” textiles still struggle with the challenge of finding seamless solutions to currently available, and bulky, power sources. Therefore, the focus of our presentation will be on one of the fundamental components to all electronics: energy storage. We will present cutting edge research on textile energy storage, the design and engineering challenges researchers like ourselves still face, and how textile energy storage fits into the world-scope of research on flexible energy technologies. We will also elaborate on the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and how it has been a key element to the success of our research.

I last posted about  about nanotechnology-enabled textiles, which harvest energy  in my May 9, 2012 posting about a project at the University of Utah for the US Army.