Evaporation-driven generic, high-throughput and roll-to-roll printing of nanomaterials

Description

Xu Xiang and colleagues present a printing method that uses plain water evaporation to assemble nanomaterials into large, even films. Turning tiny materials into full-size films is a bottleneck for uses such as water cleanup, energy harvesting, and soft robotics, and most methods work only for materials with special chemical traits. Writing in twenty twenty-five, the team shows that as water evaporates from a porous support, nanomaterials drift toward the drying surface and stack into an ordered film. The process runs continuously in a roll-to-roll setup and can be patterned in space.

The method handled flat nanosheets, nanotubes, and mixes of materials, with no extra additives, and used films could be recycled. As a demonstration, graphene oxide films made this way were applied to desalination. The authors present evaporation printing as a generic, high-throughput route that frees film making from material-specific recipes.

Catalog record

Source: https://europepmc.org/articles/PMC12722323