Shu Yang, with IRG3, are Making Atomic Thin Nanosheets Stand Up for Better Energy Storage

In a paper published in Nature, faculty from IRG3: Pluperfect Nanocrystal Architectures reports a fundamentally new and scalable approach to prepare electrodes from atomic thin 2D nanosheets in the vertical orientation via self-assembly. The method beautifully marries soft matter assembly and functional hard nanomaterials by creating a coherent and long-range ordered liquid crystal phase of 2D sheets of titanium carbide, Ti₃C₂, a member of the MXene family. The resulting electrode films show rapid ion diffusion in thick films, exhibiting unprecedented energy storage performance, retaining almost 100 % of the capacitance after 20,000 cycles of galvanostatic cycling at a rate of 20 A/g, and nearly thickness-independent (up to 200 micrometers, or 0.2 mm), a thicknesses equal to or exceeding that of commercial electrodes.