The success of modern technology is dependent on the availability of a large number of materials with different properties. Historically, this has led to a reliance on natural materials for delivering a desired function, some of which are scarce or have non-ideal properties. Over the past 20 years, extensive laboratory studies have demonstrated low-dimensional materials as an exciting group of advanced materials that can provide solutions to many of the major challenges society faces, including energy storage and generation, resource sustainability, pollution remediation, and health care. Their extraordinary material properties emerge when one or more of their dimensions comprise of only a few atomic or molecular layers.
Two-dimensional materials such as graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides, and MXenes, for example, are atomically thin materials with an enormous range of physicochemical properties. They can be exfoliated from bulk crystals to engineer nanosheets with custom properties that are dependent on their thickness (such as direct band gaps). Despite their advantages and exciting prospects, one major restriction limiting their integration within our technologies is scalable, controllable manufacturing of high quality materials.
Current processes produce materials with uncontrolled nanosheet morphologies, leading to materials that are not optimised for end-user applications. This is a universal issue for all high-volume, top-down manufacturing approaches, and leads to an unnecessary use of resources to compensate for the deficiency in material quality. A compounding issue is the poor yield often obtained in manufacturing processes (~1%wt). The most environmentally sustainable exfoliation processes are mechano-chemical, avoiding the use of toxic oxidising agents by producing materials using mechanical force (e.g. shear exfoliation). While this is admirable, up to 99% of the feedstock material does not get converted into a valuable low- dimensional material, and instead this ends up as waste. This introduces environmental problems, mineral under-usage, and resource security concerns for the UK given many raw materials are located in other geographical regions.
The aim of this project is to address these issues by creating a self-driven manufacturing solution that produces high quality materials with custom properties on-demand, while simultaneously embedding circular economy principles for reusing the vast quantities of feedstock that end up as waste from these manufacturing systems. Underpinned by interdisciplinary research spanning fluid dynamics, materials science, engineering, and applied data science, a transformative manufacturing solution will be developed that significantly departs from the state-of-the-art. It will be scalable and process-agnostic, manufacturing custom materials from all types of liquid-exfoliation processes (chemical, mechanical, electrochemical) and easily transferrable into a rapidly growing UK industry. This will open up the route for sustainable industrial scale manufacturing and facilitate the large-scale growth of novel technologies and functional devices that will lead to a more sustainable society.
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