ABSTRACT
The detection of toxic, harmful, explosive, and volatile gases cannot be separated from gas sensors, and gas sensors are also used to monitor the greenhouse effect and air pollution. However, existing gas sensors remain with many drawbacks, such as lower sensitivity, lower selectivity, and unstable room temperature detection. Thus, there is an imperative need to find more suitable sensing materials. The emergence of a new 2D layered material MXenes has brought dawn to solve this problem. The multiple advantages of MXenes, namely high specific surface area, enriched terminal functionality groups, hydrophilicity, and good electrical conductivity, make them among the most prolific gas-sensing materials. Therefore, this review paper describes the current main synthesis methods of MXenes materials, and focuses on summarizing and organizing the latest research results of MXenes in gas sensing applications. It also introduces the possible gas sensing mechanisms of MXenes materials on NH3 , NO2 , CH3 , and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). In conclusion, it provides insight into the problems and upcoming challenges of MXenes materials for gas sensing.
ABSTRACT
Magnetically actuated miniature robots have attracted the attention of the scientific community over the past two decades, but the confined workspace of their manipulation system (typically a tri-axial coil or eight electromagnetic coils) and the low efficiency of propulsion have limited their utility. Here, we describe a highly efficient NiFe nanorod-based magnetic miniature swimmer that can be manipulated in 3D spaces using two pairs of coils placed in the x-y horizontal plane. In the new swimmer, the shape symmetry is broken along its body, and the asymmetry in magnetizations is introduced perpendicular to the long axis of its body simultaneously. Such a combined asymmetry design offers favorable controllability in planar magnetic fields, which relaxes the multi-axial coil requirement of the commonly used manipulation system and thus reduces the restriction on the shape and size of the workspaces. The new swimmers display efficient 3D propulsion, with a speed of over 5000 µm s-1 (â¼3 body length s-1) and powerful locomotion in biological media such as raw human blood. The fuel utilization efficiency of the swimmer, defined as the ratio of the distance to the net input work in one period, was estimated to be approximately from 10-2 to 10-3 m/J, which is significantly higher than that of magnetic motors with a slender body. Moreover, to provide practical support for further potential use, we demonstrated that the swimmer is able to perform incision operations as a minimally invasive microsurgical tool. Such a swimmer actuation strategy provides a simple and efficient way for 3D manipulation of magnetic miniature robots, offering great potential for future biomedical and other applications.
ABSTRACT
Shape-transformable liquid metal (LM) micromachines have attracted the attention of the scientific community over the past 5 years, but the inconvenience of transfer routes and the use of corrosive fuels have limited their potential applications. In this work, a shape-transformable LM micromotor that is fabricated by a simple, versatile ice-assisted transfer printing method is demonstrated, in which an ice layer is employed as a "sacrificial" substrate that can enable the direct transfer of LM micromotors to arbitrary target substrates conveniently. The resulting LM microswimmers display efficient propulsion of over 60 µm s-1 (≈3 bodylength s-1 ) under elliptically polarized magnetic fields, comparable to that of the common magnetic micro/nanomotors with rigid bodies. Moreover, these LM micromotors can undergo dramatic morphological transformation in an aqueous environment under the irradiation of an alternating magnetic field. The ability to transform the shape and efficiently propel LM microswimmers holds great promise for chemical sensing, controlled cargo transport, materials science, and even artificial intelligence in ways that are not possible with rigid-bodies microrobots.
