Decoupling Ionic and Electronic Pathways in Low-Dimensional Hybrid Conductors

The construction of two-dimensional (2D) layered compounds for nanofluidic ion transport has recently attracted increasing interest due to the facile fabrication, tunable channel size, and high flux of these materials. Here we design a nacre-mimetic graphite-based nanofluidic structure in which the nanometer-thick graphite flakes are wrapped by negatively charged nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC) fibers to form multiple 2D confined spacings as nanochannels for rapid cation transport. At the same time, the graphite-NFC structure exhibits an ultralow electrical conductivity (σ_e ≤ 10^-9 S/cm), even when the graphite concentration is up to 50 wt %, well above the percolation threshold (∼1 wt %). By tuning the hydration degree of graphite-NFC composites, the surface-charge-governed ion transport in the confined ∼1 nm spacings exhibits nearly 12 times higher ionic conductivity (1 × 10^-3 S/cm) than that of a fully swollen structure (∼1.5 nm, 8.5 × 10^-5 S/cm) at salt concentrations up to 0.1 M. The resulting charge selective conductor shows intriguing features of both high ionic conductivity and low electrical conductivity. Moreover, the inherent stability of the graphite and NFC components contributes to the strong functionality of the nanofluidic ion conductors in both acidic and basic environments. Our work demonstrates this 1D-2D material hybrid system as a suitable platform to study nanofluidic ion transport and provides a promising strategy to decouple ionic and electronic pathways, which is attractive for applications in new nanofluidic device designs.