Functional Janus structured liquids and aerogels

Ahmadreza Ghaffarkhah; Seyyed Alireza Hashemi; Farhad Ahmadijokani; Milad Goodarzi; Hossein Riazi; Sameer E Mhatre; Orysia Zaremba; Orlando J Rojas; Masoud Soroush; Thomas P Russell; Stefan Wuttke; Milad Kamkar; Mohammad Arjmand

doi:10.1038/s41467-023-43319-7

Functional Janus structured liquids and aerogels

Nat Commun. 2023 Nov 28;14(1):7811. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-43319-7.

Authors

Ahmadreza Ghaffarkhah^#^{1

2}, Seyyed Alireza Hashemi^#¹, Farhad Ahmadijokani^{1

2}, Milad Goodarzi¹, Hossein Riazi³, Sameer E Mhatre², Orysia Zaremba⁴, Orlando J Rojas², Masoud Soroush³, Thomas P Russell^{5

6

7}, Stefan Wuttke^{8

9}, Milad Kamkar¹⁰, Mohammad Arjmand¹¹

Affiliations

¹ Nanomaterials and Polymer Nanocomposites Laboratory, School of Engineering, University of British Columbia, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7, Canada.
² Bioproducts Institute, Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering, Department of Chemistry and Department of Wood Science, The University of British Columbia, 2360 East Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z3, Canada.
³ Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA.
⁴ Basque Center for Materials, Applications and Nanostructures (BCMaterials), Bld. Martina Casiano, 3rd Floor UPV/EHU Science Park Barrio Sarriena s/n, 48940, Leioa, Spain.
⁵ Polymer Science and Engineering Department, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 120 Governors Drive, Amherst, MA, 01003, USA. russell@mail.pse.umass.edu.
⁶ Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA. russell@mail.pse.umass.edu.
⁷ Advanced Institute for Materials Research (WPI-AIMR), Tohoku University, 2-1-1 Katahira, Aoba, Sendai, 980-8577, Japan. russell@mail.pse.umass.edu.
⁸ Basque Center for Materials, Applications and Nanostructures (BCMaterials), Bld. Martina Casiano, 3rd Floor UPV/EHU Science Park Barrio Sarriena s/n, 48940, Leioa, Spain. stefan.wuttke@bcmaterials.net.
⁹ IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science, 48013, Bilbao, Spain. stefan.wuttke@bcmaterials.net.
¹⁰ Department of Chemical Engineering, Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada. milad.kamkar@uwaterloo.ca.
¹¹ Nanomaterials and Polymer Nanocomposites Laboratory, School of Engineering, University of British Columbia, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7, Canada. mohammad.arjmand@ubc.ca.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Janus structures have unique properties due to their distinct functionalities on opposing faces, but have yet to be realized with flowing liquids. We demonstrate such Janus liquids with a customizable distribution of nanoparticles (NPs) throughout their structures by joining two aqueous streams of NP dispersions in an apolar liquid. Using this anisotropic integration platform, different magnetic, conductive, or non-responsive NPs can be spatially confined to opposite sides of the original interface using magnetic graphene oxide (mGO)/GO, Ti₃C₂T_x/GO, or GO suspensions. The resultant Janus liquids can be used as templates for versatile, responsive, and mechanically robust aerogels suitable for piezoresistive sensing, human motion monitoring, and electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding with a tuned absorption mechanism. The EMI shields outperform their current counterparts in terms of wave absorption, i.e., SE_T ≈ 51 dB, SE_R ≈ 0.4 dB, and A = 0.91, due to their high porosity ranging from micro- to macro-scales along with non-interfering magnetic and conductive networks imparted by the Janus architecture.