(614c) Tuning Colloidal Behavior of Mxene Suspensions Toward Designing Functional Biohybrids

MXene (Ti₃C₂T_x, T = OH, O, F), a new member of the 2D materials family, is a metal carbide with excellent prospects in the fields of electrochemistry and environmental protection. However, for each specific application, taking full advantage of the inherent properties of MXene sheets relies highly on the components assemblies. The sheets configuration in aqueous media is governed by the competition of long-range double layer repulsion and short-range attraction. Therefore, to engineer the MXene 2D nanosheets structures, their self-assembling behavior with respect to the surrounding media should be studied. In this work, Ti₃C₂T_x MXene is synthesized from its MAX precursor, Ti₃AlC_2, through a minimally intensive layer delamination method to reach single layer sheets without sonication. Dynamic light scattering is utilized to track the aggregation behavior of MXene particles, with changing the repulsive energy barrier among the layers through adjusting pH and electrolyte concentration. Also, a globular protein model is used to illustrate the effect of a positively charged guest-component on the assembly of the negatively charged MXene sheets at different physicochemical conditions.