Nanosheets Fabrication Made Easy With New Technology That Can Do the Job in a Minute

Fabricating nanosheets is not easy and usually requires expertise and time to do accurately. However, thanks to new technology, it can now be done in as fast as a minute.

New Technology to Fabricate Nanosheets

Over the past ten years, a variety of nanosheets, including graphene oxide (GO), molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), and poly(l-lactic acid) nanosheets, have been produced and used in vitro in cellular research. Researchers have created novel cell/protein sensing/imaging techniques and achieved regulation of particular cell processes using the features of nanosheets, such as their flexibility and simplicity of modification, according to the National Library of Medicine.

Aside from being used in cellular research, nanosheets have electrochemical applications too. They are widely used as electrodes in supercapacitors.

The Institute for Future Materials and Systems (IMaSS) at Nagoya University in Japan has developed a new method to create nanosheets, thin films of two-dimensional materials a few nanometers thick, in about a minute. The research team led by Professor Minoru Osada (he, him) and postdoctoral researcher Yue Shi (she, her) came up with a new strategy using a new solution, Phys.org reported.

With only one click, this technique creates massive, high-quality nanosheet films without specialist training or equipment. Their discoveries are anticipated to help advance the industrial fabrication of various nanosheet devices.

The Langmuir-Blodgett method, one of the current fabrication methods for very thin films, calls for complex operating conditions and requires expertise. According to Osada, fabricating a single layer takes around an hour using the current techniques. This causes a significant bottleneck in the production of nanosheets.

The team set out to create a novel method that can quickly and efficiently generate monolayer films of nanosheets in high-quality, cleanly tiled monolayers. With a single drop of a colloidal aqueous solution applied to a substrate heated on a hotplate using an automatic pipette, they created an automated film-forming technique that created nanosheets in about a minute. They then removed the liquid and aspirated the solution after this—an evenly spaced, nicely tiled monolayer film sans gaps between each nanosheet.

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How Does the New Technology For Nanosheet Fabrication Work?

According to Osada, the overlap and gaps between the nanosheets were inhibited by lowering the colloidal aqueous solution's surface tension and encouraging the nanosheet's convection, which gave us control over its alignment. By repeating the carefully tiled monolayer film production operation, layer-by-layer assembly of multilayer films governed by the nanosheet thickness unit was practicable.

The newly created technique is anticipated to play a significant role in the fabrication of industrial thin films as well as the nano-coating of nanosheets because it is quick, easy, and only needs a small amount of solution to produce a high-quality, large-area film with a neatly tiled alignment.

The technology does not require specific knowledge or technology because it is based on straightforward drop and aspiration procedures utilizing an automatic pipette. According to Osada, this approach can generate films on substrates made of a wide range of shapes, sizes, and materials and applies to nanosheets with different compositions and topologies, such as oxides, graphene, and boron nitride.

The study was published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.