Evaporation-driven generic, high-throughput and roll-to-roll printing of nanomaterials

Manufacturing low-dimensional nanomaterials into macroscopic films, going beyond the limit of conventional polymer counterparts, can unleash the potential of advanced separation, energy harvesting, optical/thermal management, and soft robotics. Despite enormous achievements, it remains untouchable to achieve large-scale and high-throughput manufacturing of arbitrary nanomaterials into uniform films using a facile and generic strategy. Herein, we demonstrate an original evaporation-driven printing (EDP) approach that enables high-throughput roll-to-roll and spatially-programmable fabrication of various nanomaterials into multi-functional composite films, overcoming the limitations of conventional strategies demanding specific physicochemical properties of nanomaterials. The EDP approach leverages a ubiquitous physical phenomenon of water evaporation for driving rapid bottom-up mobility and gathering of nanomaterials toward the evaporated interface and eventually assembling into orientated nanomaterial-stacked films on the surface of porous substrates due to the presence of size-screening effect. Unlike conventional nanomaterials printing, the EDP can be applicable for arbitrary nanomaterials from 2D nanosheets to 1D nanotube and their combination for multi-materials and recyclable printing without the need of extra additives. EDP-manufactured graphene oxide films can be harnessed as desalination with over 95.0% rejection for sodium sulfate, outperforming most graphene oxide-based counterparts. Moreover, EDP is also capable of printing high-performance electromagnetic shielding materials by virtue of printed ordered lamellar structures as continuous conductive pathways.