Water-icing-triggered scalable and controllable exfoliation of hexagonal boron nitride nanosheets

LL An and R Gu and B Zhong and YL Yu and JY Zhang, CELL REPORTS PHYSICAL SCIENCE, 3, 100941 (2022).

DOI: 10.1016/j.xcrp.2022.100941

Hexagonal boron nitride nanosheets (h-BNNSs) are a functional mate-rial with excellent performance; they have broad application prospects in the field of heat dissipation of electronic devices. To achieve commer-cial application as soon as possible, there is an urgent need to develop a simple, controllable, and scalable method to produce high-quality h-BNNSs. Here, a scalable and controllable approach is proposed to exfoliate high-quality h-BNNSs from hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) flakes that relies on efficient reduction of h-BNNS interlayer interaction by rapid volume expansion of water in icing. The effectiveness and feasi-bility of this method are verified by molecular dynamics simulations. The thickness of h-BNNSs is determined by freezing and exfoliation cycles, and monolayer h-BNNSs can be obtained after five cycles of freezing and exfoliation. The as-obtained h-BNNSs have excellent dispersibility in water, enabling versatile application as polymer additives, thermal conductive fillers, flame retardants, and more.

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