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Updated: Jun 23, 2025
Generation of Scalable, Metallic High-Aspect Ratio Nanocomposites in a Biological Liquid Medium
Published on: July 8, 2015
Highly Regular Layered Structure via Dual-Spatially-Confined Alignment of Nanosheets Enables High-Performance
Si-Chao Zhang1, YuanZhen Hou2, Si-Ming Chen1
1Department of Chemistry, New Cornerstone Science Laboratory, Institute of Biomimetic Materials and Chemistry, Anhui Engineering Laboratory of Biomimetic Materials, Division of Nanomaterials and Chemistry, Hefei National Research Center for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230026, China.
Abstract:
Assembling ultrathin nanosheets into layered structure represents one promising way to fabricate high-performance nanocomposites. However, how to minimize the internal defects of the layered assemblies to fully exploit the intrinsic mechanical superiority of nanosheets remains challenging. Here, a dual-scale spatially confined strategy for the co-assembly of ultrathin nanosheets with different aspect ratios into a near-perfect layered structure is developed. Large-aspect-ratio (LAR) nanosheets are aligned due to the microscale confined space of a flat microfluidic channel, small-aspect-ratio (SAR) nanosheets are aligned due to the nanoscale confined space between adjacent LAR nanosheets. During this co-assembly process, SAR nanosheets can flatten LAR nanosheets, thus reducing wrinkles and pores of the assemblies. Benefiting from the precise alignment (orientation degree of 90.74%) of different-sized nanosheets, efficient stress transfer between nanosheets and interlayer matrix is achieved, resulting in layered nanocomposites with multiscale mechanical enhancement and superior fatigue durability (100 000 bending cycles). The proposed co-assembly strategy can be used to orderly integrate high-quality nanosheets with different sizes or diverse functions toward high-performance or multifunctional nanocomposites.
