Crafting MXenes
Just like you need many layers to make the perfect croissant, a special material made of lots of super thin metal layers has been created by scientists. Layer by layer, they can insert different types ions in between them for particular tasks. This could be extremely useful for making future high-tech electronics or storing energy.
Until recently, creating MXenes (which are pronounced “max-eens”) items was as hard as making a perfect croissant in a French bakery. But now scientists from the University of Chicago have found an easier and faster way to make these materials, with fewer bad things coming out when producing them. The discovery was published in a journal called Science and it’s hoped that this will lead to more innovations and put MXenes into everyday gadgets such as phones and computers.
Unlocking the Potential of MXenes
In 2011, when scientists discovered MXenes they got really excited because it was different than other metals.Usually when you make a metal, like gold or titanium, into an atomic-thin sheet, then it won’t have the same metal properties as before. But MXenes were special because the strong chemical bonds kept them with all of their metal abilities – like conducting electricity very well.
MXenes have a lot of cool features. They can be changed in different ways, like by adding ions to them, which can help store energy. All these capabilities could make MXenes really helpful for making new devices that do things like hold electricity or block out radio noise.
Before, the only way we discovered how to make MXenes was by going through several complicated chemical processes – like heating our mix at a very high temperature (3,000F) and then dipping it into hydrofluoric acid.
Dmitri Talapin, an expert scientist at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory said that it is okay to produce small amounts of chemicals in a laboratory for experiments but if we want to make large quantities of those chemicals to use in industry, it will create a huge problem with disposing the waste.
The team wanted to come up with a way to make reactions more efficient and less damaging to the environment. To do this, they used some ideas from chemistry called “atom economy”, which means trying to use as few atoms as possible during a reaction.
A group of people from UChicago found a way to create MXenes by just mixing and heating some different materials. It’s really simple, you just need to blend a few substances with the specific metal you would like and heat them up to 1,700°F. “Once all that is done, there you will have it,” said Wang.
Scientists recently found a way to create and explore new kinds of materials called MXenes. This method is simpler than before and less harmful to the environment. The team tried out this method with titanium and zirconium, but they think it could be used for many other metal combinations too.
According to Wang, these new MXenes are also very pretty as they look like standing flowers. The petals of the flower-like structure make it easy for ions and molecules to get in between the metal layers which can be beneficial for different reactions.
Recently, an article was published that explains a new way of making 2D carbide and nitride MXenes. This article is titled “Direct synthesis and chemical vapor deposition of 2D carbide and nitride MXenes” by Di Wang, Chenkun Zhou, Alexander S. Filatov, Wooje Cho, Francisco Lagunas, Mingzhan Wang, Suriyanarayanan Vaikuntanathan, Chong Liu, Robert F. Klie and Dmitri V. Talapin on 23 March 2023 in the journal Science with a DOI of 10.1126/science.add9204.
Wooje Cho, a graduate student, worked with other people from different departments at the University of Chicago. These included: Suri Vaikuntanathan (theoretical chemist), Alexander Filatov (head of an X-ray research facility), Chong Liu and Mingzhan Wang (electrochemists) from the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, Robert Klie and Francisco Lagunas (electron microscopists) from the University of Illinois Chicago. All these people worked together to make this research possible.
The research was done with help from the U.S. Department of Energy, the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. We learned about “ocular prodrugs”: a special type of drug that treats eye diseases like glaucoma. We also discovered new ways to measure the retinal cells in our eyes using something called an optical coherence tomography machine.
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