‘Potentially so exciting’: Chinese team finds a way to mass-produce nanosheets with unusual properties

Chinese scientists have found a way to mass-produce nanosheets from transition-metal tellurides – a 2D material they say could have many applications, from lithium batteries to solar panels.

The team led by scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Peking University said their “fast and scalable” production method could bring the nanosheets out of laboratories and into practical use.

Writing in the peer-reviewed journal Nature last week, they said their method was faster and safer than existing ones that have a much smaller yield, and it could be used to make batteries with higher stability and energy density.

TMTs are a combination of the metal tellurium and transition metals such as tungsten and niobium. They can be turned into 2D nanosheets where the transition metal is “sandwiched” by tellurium, the CAS said in a statement.

It said TMT nanosheets were a promising area for development because of their unusual properties, including semiconducting and superconducting, insulation and magnetic activity.

Because of these properties, TMT materials “have received widespread attention from the international academic community”, said Wu Zhongshuai, corresponding author and a chemist with the CAS Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics.

The nanosheets could be used in areas ranging from energy storage and developing “novel electrodes” for supercapacitors and batteries, to hydrogen production and photovoltaics, the statement said.

They could also be used as electrocatalysts to improve the performance of lithium-oxygen batteries due to being more stable and having a bigger storage capacity, according to the paper.