Supergravity‐Steered Generic Manufacturing of Nanosheets‐Embedded Nanocomposite Hydrogel with Highly Oriented, Heterogeneous Architecture

Abstract

AbstractDesigning nanocomposite hydrogels with oriented nanosheets has emerged as a promising toolkit to achieve preferential performances that go beyond their disordered counterparts. Although current fabrication strategies via electric/magnetic force fields have made remarkable achievements, they necessitate special properties of nanosheets and suffer from an inferior orientation degree of nanosheets. Herein, a facile and universal approach is discovered to elaborate MXene‐based nanocomposite hydrogels with highly oriented, heterogeneous architecture by virtue of supergravity to replace conventional force fields. The key to such architecture is to leverage bidirectional, force‐tunable attributes of supergravity containing coupled orthogonal shear and centrifugal force field for steering high‐efficient movement, pre‐orientation, and stacking of MXene nanosheets in the bottom. Such a synergetic effect allows for yielding heterogeneous nanocomposite hydrogels with a high‐orientation MXene‐rich layer (orientation degree, f = 0.83) and a polymer‐rich layer. The authors demonstrate that MXene‐based nanocomposite hydrogels leverage their high‐orientation, heterogeneous architecture to deliver an extraordinary electromagnetic interference shielding effectiveness of 55.2 dB at 12.4 GHz yet using a super‐low MXene of 0.3 wt%, surpassing most hydrogels‐based electromagnetic shielding materials. This versatile supergravity‐steered strategy can be further extended to arbitrary nanosheets including MoS2, GO, and C3N4, offering a paradigm in the development of oriented nanocomposites.