Self-assembly and ion transport behaviour of liquid-crystalline graphene oxide multilayer sandwich nanopapers

ABSTRACT

The controllability of ion channel size is critical for ion transport and sieving. Graphene oxide (GO) has a planar two-dimensional structure and a rich functional group as a binding site, and the liquid crystal material generally undergoes an orientation change under the action of an external force field. Therefore, this property can be incorporated into GO, and the distance between the layers of GO can be controlled by designing the liquid crystal cell which meets the requirements and adjusting the external force field, thereby controlling the transport of ions. In this paper, multilayer sandwich nanopapers were fabricated by liquid crystals and GO via hydrogen bonding, and the controlled ion transport behaviour was investigated. In the presence of external electric or magnetic field, ion channels in the interlayer distance of sandwich GO nanopapers can be adjusted due to the changes of mesogen orientation; therefore, ion conductivity can be adjusted when a lithium-ion solution pass through the nanopapers. Such nano-paper materials show promise in many fields such as ion transport, separation systems, ion battery and capacitor devices.

Graphical abstract

KEYWORDS:

• Liquid crystals
• graphene oxide
• self-assembly
• ion conductivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Featured Biochemical and Chemical Materials (Ningde Normal University), Fujian Natural Science Foundation [2019J0106, 2017J01589], National Natural Science Foundation of China [21802077] and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [N180705004].