Scientists and researchers are tackling climate change resilience and the growth of the renewable energy fields every day with new developments such as heat batteries and travel-size desalination units.
A team from the Tulane University School of Science and Engineering has developed a new family of 2D materials which can change the game of batteries and conductive materials and potentially many more technologies.
Marrying two materials into a brand new family
The new material could have revolutionized applications for high-capacity batteries and advanced electronics, and it is simple and scalable. The 2D material is essentially a marriage of two preexisting materials. It is called transition metal carbo-chalcogenides (TMCC). It is a combination of transition metal carbides and transition metal dichalcogenides. If those don’t sound familiar, don’t worry.
The first one is a widely explored material known for excellent electrochemical energy storage and conversion, but it is poor for conductivity and stability. The second one, however, has very powerful conductivity, and TMCC has all the benefits of both.
“Two-dimensional materials are nanomaterials with thickness in the nanometer size (a nanometer is one-millionth of a millimeter) and lateral dimensions thousands of times the thickness,” said Michael Naguib, team leader and the Ken & Ruth Arnold Early Career Professor in Science and Engineering. “Their flatness offers a unique set of properties compared to bulk materials.”
“Instead of stacking the two different materials like Lego building blocks with many problematic interfaces, here we develop a new 2D material that has the combination of both compositions without any interface,” he said.
Having batteries that are conductors as well as storers of electricity could be a game-changer for efficient storage and transfer of energy in the future. TMCC could also have many applications in supercapacitors, catalysis, sensors, and other electronics.
Source Study: Tulane News — Tulane scientists develop powerful family of two-dimensional materials | Tulane News
