The Tulane University School of Science and Engineering team has created a new family of two-dimensional (A powerful family of two-dimensional materials) materials that scientists say have good applications, including advanced electronics and high-capacity batteries.
The study (A powerful family of two-dimensional materials), led by Michael Naguib, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Engineering Physics, was published in the journal Advanced Materials. “Two-dimensional materials are nanomaterials with a thickness the size of a nanometer (nanometer one millionth of a millimeter) and side dimensions a thousand times the thickness,” he said. Naguib. “Their distribution offers a unique set of properties compared to many materials.”
The name of the new family of 2D materials is transition metal carbo-chalcogenides or TMCC. It combines the properties of two families of 2D materials – transition metal carbide and transition metal dichalcogenides.
Naguib, Ken & Ruth Arnold, an early professor of science and engineering, said the latter is a large group of materials that have been thoroughly researched and found to be very good, especially for the storage and conversion of electrochemical energy. . But he said one of the problems with their use is their low electrical conductivity and power. On the other hand, he said, transition metal carbides are very good electrical conductors with much stronger conductivity. Combining two families into one is expected to have many options for many applications, such as batteries and supercapacitors, catalysis, sensors and electronics.
“Instead of assembling two different materials, such as Lego kits with a lot of problematic interfaces, we’re creating a new 2D material here with a combination of two compositions that have no interface,” he said.
“We used an electrochemically assisted peeling process by inserting lithium ions between the transition metal carbo-chalcogenide layers followed by water mixing,” said Ahmad Majed, first author of the article and PhD student in materials physics and engineering at Tulane working. with the Naguib group.
Unlike other exotic nanomaterials, Majed said, the process of making these 2D TMCC nanomaterials is simple and scalable. In addition to Naguib and Majeda, the group includes Jiang Wei, associate professor of physics and engineering physics; Jianwei Sun, Assistant Professor of Physics and Engineering Physics; Candidates for doctoral studies include Kaitlyn Prenger, Manish Kothakonda and Fei Wang of Tulane; and Dr. Eric N. Tseng and Professor Per O.A. Persson at Linköping University in Sweden.
The study was supported by the Naguib National Science Foundation Career Award, which he received less than a year ago.
