Christina Dahlström

Exfoliated MoS2 in Water without Additives

Many solution processing methods of exfoliation of layered materials have been studied during the last few years; most of them are based on organic solvents or rely on surfactants and other funtionalization agents. Pure water should be an ideal solvent, however, it is generally believed, based on solubility theories that stable dispersions of water could not be achieved and systematic studies are lacking. Here we describe the use of water as a solvent and the stabilization process involved therein. We introduce an exfoliation method of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) in pure water at high concentration (i.e., 0.14 ± 0.01 g L−1). This was achieved by thinning the bulk MoS2 by mechanical exfoliation between sand papers and dispersing it by liquid exfoliation through probe sonication in water. We observed thin MoS2 nanosheets in water characterized by TEM, AFM and SEM images. The dimensions of the nanosheets were around 200 nm, the same range obtained in organic solvents. Electrophoretic mobility measurements indicated that electrical charges may be responsible for the stabilization of the dispersions. A probability decay equation was proposed to compare the stability of these dispersions with the ones reported in the literature. Water can be used as a solvent to disperse nanosheets and although the stability of the dispersions may not be as high as in organic solvents, the present method could be employed for a number of applications where the dispersions can be produced on site and organic solvents are not desirable.

New method for characterizing paper coating structures using argon ion beam milling and field emission scanning electron microscopy

We have developed a new method for characterizing microstructures of paper coating using argon ion beam milling technique and field emission scanning electron microscopy. The combination of these two techniques produces extremely high‐quality images with very few artefacts, which are particularly suited for quantitative analyses of coating structures. A new evaluation method has been developed by using marker‐controlled watershed segmentation technique of the secondary electron images. The high‐quality secondary electron images with well‐defined pores makes it possible to use this semi‐automatic segmentation method. One advantage of using secondary electron images instead of backscattered electron images is being able to avoid possible overestimation of the porosity because of the signal depth. A comparison was made between the new method and the conventional method using greyscale histogram thresholding of backscattered electron images. The results showed that the conventional method overestimated the pore area by 20% and detected around 5% more pores than the new method. As examples of the application of the new method, we have investigated the distributions of coating binders, and the relationship between local coating porosity and base sheet structures. The technique revealed, for the first time with direct evidence, the long‐suspected coating non‐uniformity, i.e. binder migration, and the correlation between coating porosity versus base sheet mass density, in a straightforward way.

Electrode Mass Balancing as an Inexpensive and Simple Method to Increase the Capacitance of Electric Double-Layer Capacitors.

Symmetric electric double-layer capacitors (EDLCs) have equal masses of the same active material in both electrodes. However, having equal electrode masses may prevent the EDLC to have the largest possible specific capacitance if the sizes of the hydrated anions and cations in the electrolyte differ because the electrodes and the electrolyte may not be completely utilized. Here we demonstrate how this issue can be resolved by mass balancing. If the electrode masses are adjusted according to the size of the ions, one can easily increase an EDLC’s specific capacitance. To that end, we performed galvanostatic cycling to measure the capacitances of symmetric EDLCs with different electrode mass ratios using four aqueous electrolytes— Na2SO4, H2SO4, NaOH, and KOH (all with a concentration of 1 M)—and compared these to the theoretical optimal electrode mass ratio that we calculated using the sizes of the hydrated ions. Both the theoretical and experimental values revealed lower-than-1 optimal electrode ratios for all electrolytes except KOH. The largest increase in capacitance was obtained for EDLCs with NaOH as electrolyte. Specifically, we demonstrate an increase of the specific capacitance by 8.6% by adjusting the electrode mass ratio from 1 to 0.86. Our findings demonstrate that electrode mass balancing is a simple and inexpensive method to increase the capacitance of EDLCs. Furthermore, our results imply that one can reduce the amount of unused material in EDLCs and thus decrease their weight, volume and cost.

Controlled Synthesis of Cu and Cu2O NPs and Incorporation of Octahedral Cu2O NPs in Cellulose II Films

In this study, Cu and Cu2O nanoparticles (NPs) were synthesized through chemical reduction of soluble copper-chelating ligand complexes using formaldehyde as a reducing agent. The influence of various chelating ligands, such as ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA), diethylenetriaminepentaacetic acid (DTPA), and a surface-active derivative of DTPA (C12-DTPA), as well as surfactants (i.e., hexadecyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB), dodecyltrimethylammonium chloride (DoTAC), sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS), and dimethyldodecylamine-N-oxide (DDAO)), on morphology and the composition of produced NPs was investigated. In the absence of surfactants, spherical copper particles with polycrystalline structure could be obtained. X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis revealed that, in the presence of EDTA, the synthesized NPs are mainly composed of Cu with a crystallite size on the order of 35 nm, while with DTPA and C12-DTPA, Cu2O is also present in the NPs as a minority phase. The addition of ionic surfactants to the copper–EDTA complex solution before reduction resulted in smaller spherical particles, mainly composed of Cu. However, when DDAO was added, pure Cu2O nano-octahedrons were formed, as verified by high-resolution scanning electron microscopy (HR-SEM) and XRD. Furthermore, a hybrid material could be successfully prepared by mixing the octahedral Cu2O NPs with cellulose dissolved in a LiOH/urea solvent system, followed by spin-coating on silica wafers. It is expected that this simple and scalable route to prepare hybrid materials could be applied to a variety of possible applications.