3D Printing of 2D Atomically Thin Materials

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the first 3D printing of atomically thin 2D materials into miniaturizable supercapacitors with high capacitance, mechanical robustness, and chemical stability, enabling advanced miniaturized electronic devices.

Contribution

It introduces a novel 3D printing method for 2D materials, enabling complex architectures and high-performance miniaturized energy storage devices.

Findings

Achieved 3D printed structures with mm2 footprints and micron features.

Demonstrated supercapacitors with areal capacitance of 1450 mF/cm2.

Structures show mechanical robustness and chemical stability.

Abstract

The emerging new paradigm of technologies, the internet of things, entails a process of device miniaturization to combine several functional components, such as sensors, actuators, and powering elements, in a single individual on-chip platform. An essential requirement is for the devices to have a small footprint and thus to be extended over three-dimensions to present adequate performance. A suitable technique to realize devices of complex architectures and virtually any size is three-dimensional printing. So far its use has seen applications exclusively at the macroscale. Here we report the first 3D printed architectures via robocasting of two-dimensional atomically thin transition metal dichalcogenides demonstrating their use as miniaturizable supercapacitors. The structures are fabricated via direct printing of a liquid ink of chemically exfoliated 2D nanosheets. The 3D printed architectures present footprints in the mm2 scale and micron-sized features and they demonstrate mechanical robustness and chemical stability. They exhibit areal capacitance of 1450 mF/cm2, rivalling and surpassing comparable devices. Microsupercapacitors comprising two-dimensional atomically thin sheets can enable miniaturization and upscaleable production technologies for wide-scale adoption.