Shear stress-induced delamination method for the mass production of Ti3C2T MXene nanosheets

MXene nanosheets are considered advantageous for functional materials, but current delamination methods to prepare MXene nanosheets have many limitations including high cost, small production scale, low efficiency, and deteriorated structure integrity of obtained nanosheets. Here, we propose a simple, efficient, and scalable shear stress-induced delamination (SSID) strategy to boost the production of single-/few-layered Ti3C2Tx MXene nanosheets. Molecular dynamics simulation indicates that the pan mill-type grinding discs create a strong hydrodynamic flow field, which exerts gigantic shear stress to substantially delaminate the multilayered MXene stacks into homogeneously dispersed MXene nanosheets. Furthermore, shear stress generated from vigorous water flow has limited fragmentation effect, ensuring large lateral size and good structure integrity to the obtained MXene nanosheets as evidenced by the morphological and structural characterizations. Compared to conventional delamination methods, this novel SSID strategy exhibits great advantages in terms of efficiency, scalability and the properties of resultant MXene nanosheets, which opens up great opportunity for the scalable production and commercialization of high-performance MXene-based materials.