Integrated 2D MXene Smart-Textile for Multifunctional Applications

Prof. A. Ahmed et al., and his collaboration research team at various Universities from USA and India have been reviewed on the multifunctional integrated 2D MXene smart-textile interfaces. This research review was reported in Chemistry of Materials (ACS journal) published on 8^thDecember 2020.

Next generation electronics have emerged as a unique platform for soft robotics, wearable smart textiles, and virtual reality etc., towards the multifunctional applications. Smart textile based devices played a major vital role in wearable electronics, personal thermal management, real-time monitoring of healthcare, also have contributed in the areas of energy harvesting to energy storage, sensors etc. It can be seen that, a significant attention has been augmented for the wearable smart textile systems which offers portable sensing, self-powered energy management, and health monitoring for the nanofabrication of textiles with electroactive materials.

As the emergence of two-dimensional (2D) transition metal carbide and nitride were commonly termed as “MXene”. MXene-based materials have attracted huge attention owing to its unique and excellent properties such as excellent processability, rich surface chemistry, metallic conductivity, and tunable terminations in the research community. Further, they have reviewed the current progress in MXene-based textile for various applications like fabrics, yarns, fibers, and composites followed by the preparation of MXene for textiles functionalization. In addition some sort of special in the fields on sensing, flexible energy-storage systems, electromagnetic interference (EMI), smart thermotherapy, shielding, etc. The existing challenges and the future endeavours of MXene were also been discussed in detail [1].

The key aspects are required for developing the smart textile-based wearable devices are within the close contact of the human body should be soft, movable and stretchable with mechanical deformability [2]. For the development of smart interactive textiles to be used as wearables, the electroactive materials like carbon nanotube (CNT), graphene, boron nitride, conducting polymer, etc. have been utilized. Perhaps, these electronic devices are found to be rapidly expanding with exceptional application domains. Hence, there is a great importance of creation on novel functional materials [3, 4].

Generally, MXene-based functional fiber and smart textile research have led a break through with the ease of these properties and processing. On a brief overview, these scalable MXene synthesis routes has been presented and followed by the discussion with several parameters of MXene that directly influence functional fiber and smart textiles development research. Since, MXene is a new material and its still in the preliminary stage with several limitations [4].

Figure 1. Schematic of flexible and wearable MXene-based smart fabrics illustrating possible applications for (a) breath monitoring, (b) smart thermotherapy, and (c) wound dressing with effective bacterial ablation [5].

Adhesion improvement of MXene and textiles:

The improvement of adhesion between MXene and textiles is very difficult to achieve, when the textile fibers are coated of large flakes with a higher loading percentage and higher conductivity. This may cause a reduction in flexibility, adhesion, and indispensable for the wearable applications. Hence, to overcome this issue, Mxene has been functionalized with conducting binders like poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):polystyrenesulfonate (PE- DOT:PSS)PEDOT:PSS which acts as a glues and binder along with the MXene sheets to enhance their fiber surface with MXene adhesion. Another strategy used to improve the MXene adhesion is the plasma treatment that functionalized with oxygen-containing groups to the ﬁber surface [2].

Advanced applications of MXene-based textiles:

(1) MXene integrated Joule heater for thermotherapy applications:

MXene was decorated with nonwoven smart textiles and developed via a simple dip-coating approach for multifunctional applications. During the heating, the molecular extraction of water will cause an electrical response with a temperature alarm to allow for monitoring the thermotherapy with real-time temperature. To promote the healing of infected wounds, the generated heat can be homogeneously transferred to the bacterial aﬀected skin. The reversible humidity response over water-induced swelling/contraction of channels for the MXene interlayers have demonstrated a high sensitivity for the smart fabrics which can serve as for the wearable respiration monitoring system. Hence, the multifunctional MXene enabled smart fabrics, have paved the pathway for the next-generation ﬂexible electronics with healthcare issues and applications.

(2) Wearable strain sensing applications for MXene−textiles:

Stretchable and wearable strain-sensing micro-electronics have gained significant attention for the multifunction, which includes epidermal sensors for human motion detection and personalized health care. In general, these wearable sensors are affixed for the clothing or directly mounted over the human skin to facilitate the real-time tracking of human activities. Similar to graphene or other nanomaterials, this newly emerged MXenes have been investigated carefully for the ﬂexible sensorial applications. Moreover, the MXene sheets are composed with high surface functional groups, because it exhibits very less sliding tendency with each other to facilitate for the crack propagation mechanism. Hence, there is an drastic increase in the applied strains with the electrical resistance, which can leads to the fabricate the crack propagation mechanism, that have been dominated the strain sensors with high sensitivity. The MXene has been functionalized with strain sensor to be manufactured for tracking the gestures of our human body like joint movement sensing, hand motion sensing and also for the wide range motion detection with physiological signals.

Our SNB team have emphasize this research article to enrich our viewer’s knowledge about the multifunctional integrated 2D MXene smart-textile interfaces. Besides, MXene have exploited to produce electronic textiles for various multifunctional wearable applications such as humidity sensors, thermotherapy, strain sensor, supercapacitor and EMI shielding. They have also reported that MXene have not only improves the inherent properties of textile interfaces, but also unveils rapidly for emerging smart textiles, with more application ﬁelds that have also been investigated, which includes of soft robotics water puriﬁcations, photothermal therapy, actuation performance and also for the highly sophisticated applications. Thus, MXene would possess a potential candidature, which can be used for integrated 2D multifunctional applications.

References

A. Ahmed, et al., Chem. Mater.(2020), https://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.chemmater.0c03392.
S.Bhattacharjee, et al., Carbon, 166, 148 (2020).
S. Bhattacharjee, et al., Adv. Mater. Interfaces, 6, 1900622 (2019).
S.Afroj, et al., Adv. Funct. Mater. 30, 2000293 (2020).
X.Zhao, et al., ACS Nano, 14, 8793 (2020).

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