LENSD · Liquid Exfoliation of Nanomaterials using Spinning Discs

Liquid Exfoliation of Nanomaterials using Spinning Discs

Two-dimensional (2D) materials are a class of nanomaterials which posses an extraordinary range of properties. One of the most well-known of these is graphene. Many beneficial applications for graphene and other 2D materials have been suggested including opto-electronics, semiconductors, biomedical sensors, tissue engineering, drug delivery, energy conversion and storage. All of these applications are within three broad sectors that have the biggest impact on today’s society: Information Communication Technology (ICT), Biomedicine and Energy. It is therefore imperative that these exciting materials can be exploited on a large scale to address the global challenges that society faces. Scalable production is one of the main challenges limiting the widespread introduction of graphene and other 2D materials to our future technologies. In the past decade, research into production has resulted in numerous variations of bottom-up and top-down methods, whose suitability can often depend on the requirements of the intended application. Non-oxidising liquid phase exfoliation is one top-down method which has been demonstrated to produce both high quality and high concentrations of material, compared to the other methods available at least. The material is also produced in the form of a liquid dispersion, making it readily useable for applications such as printed electronics, battery and supercapacitor electrodes, and composites. Although this method has shown promise for scale-up, production output remains low. There are a number of reasons for this including: 1. lab-scale techniques are predominantly batch processes, with performances that do not scale well, or in an easily predictable way; 2. the fundamental physical mechanisms driving exfoliation in liquids are not fully understood. This project involves a multidisciplinary research effort, integrating materials science, chemical engineering, and mechanical engineering disciplines. The overall objective is to address the shortcomings noted above, using flow over a spinning disc as the test case. Combining nanomaterial characterisation techniques, with high fidelity measurements and direct numerical simulations of the hydrodynamics, unique insights into the exfoliation process have been obtained. Using this test case, the critical criteria for production have been determined, with general application to all liquid phase exfoliation techniques.

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