Silicon nanowires self-assemble into macroscopic networks for superior supplies

Researchers at IMDEA Supplies Institute have developed a pioneering technique to assemble silicon nanowires into ordered, macroscopic networks: a key step towards increasing their industrial purposes.

Silicon nanowires supply distinctive power storage capability, electrical conductivity, and mechanical power, making them best for next-generation batteries, electronics, and superior purposeful supplies.

Nevertheless, particular person silicon nanowires are simply 10–50 nanometers in diameter, roughly 1,000 occasions thinner than a strand of human hair. As such, a lot of their most promising present and potential purposes require the power to course of and assemble them into bigger bundles.

Scaling this meeting course of to an industrial degree has usually confirmed troublesome because it requires exact management over the alignment and density of the bundled nanowires, essential for his or her efficiency in purposes like batteries and sensors.

“One-dimensional nanomaterials usually exit the reactor as randomly aggregated powders,” explains researcher Dr. David Tilve. “On this disordered state, their properties and potential purposes are severely restricted. A key problem is to self-assemble these nanowires into ordered, nanostructured supplies to unlock their full potential.”

“By efficiently processing these nanowires into extremely aligned bundles, we will considerably enhance the contact floor between particular person nanowires, a function not noticed in randomly oriented networks.”

“This degree of structural order shouldn’t be easy to realize and marks a notable development in nanowire meeting methods,” he provides.

The tactic is printed within the latest publication “Ordered silicon nanowire bundle networks from aqueous dispersions” by IMDEA Supplies researchers Dr. Tilve, Felipe Lozano-Steinmetz, Dr. Isabel Gómez and Dr. Juan José Vilatela. The analysis is revealed within the journal Nanotechnology.

They discovered that suspending the nanowires in water—a course of often called aqueous suspension—after which slowly filtering the liquid through vacuum filtration, prompted the wires to line up into tightly packed bundles, which then hyperlink collectively to type paper-like networks.

“The discovering of spontaneous alignment in resolution, specifically, will result in advances in liquid crystal gadgets, photonic fibers and semiconducting textiles, amongst different potentialities,” says Dr. Tilve.

Particularly, every bundle analyzed by researchers featured round 15 particular person self-assembled nanowires with a separation between them of simply 0.4 nm, solely barely bigger than the width of a single atom.

This tight bonding course of resulted in macroscopic sheets with ordered arrays and a managed density, which had been discovered to be extremely ordered and strong. This opens the door to raised batteries, quicker electronics, and superior supplies with new optical or mechanical properties.

This analysis is of specific relevance given latest advances in large-scale silicon nanowire manufacturing.

This work is a part of IMDEA’s undertaking to bridge the nano and macro-scales via the fabrication of paper-like community supplies made from nanowires and to review the properties of those supplies for attainable optical purposes or as electrodes for power storage.