Flexible, breathable, and degradable pressure sensors with excellent sensing performance are drawing tremendous attention for various practical applications in wearable artificial skins, healthcare monitoring, and artificial intelligence due to their flexibility, breathability, lightweight, decreased electronic rubbish, and environmentally friendly impact. However, traditional plastic or elastomer substrates with impermeability, uncomfortableness, mechanical mismatches, and nondegradability greatly restricted their practical applications. Therefore, the fabrication of such pressure sensors with high flexibility, facile degradability, and breathability is still a critical challenge and highly desired. Herein, we present a wearable, breathable, degradable, and highly sensitive MXene/protein nanocomposites-based pressure sensor. The fabricated MXene/protein-based pressure sensor is assembled from a breathable conductive MXene coated silk fibroin nanofiber (MXene-SF) membrane and a silk fibroin nanofiber membrane patterned with a MXene ink-printed (MXene ink-SF) interdigitated electrode, which can serve as the sensing layer and the electrode layer, respectively. The assembled pressure sensor exhibits a wide sensing range (up to 39.3 kPa), high sensitivity (298.4 kPa–1 for 1.4–15.7 kPa; 171.9 kPa–1 for 15.7–39.3 kPa), fast response/recovery time (7/16 ms), reliable breathability, excellent cycling stability over 10 000 cycles, good biocompatibility, and robust degradability. Furthermore, it shows great sensing performance in monitoring human psychological signals, acting as an artificial skin for the quantitative illustration of pressure distribution, and wireless biomonitoring in real time. Considering the biodegradable and breathable features, the sensor may become promising to find potential applications in smart electronic skins, human motion detection, disease diagnosis, and human–machine interaction.
Reclamation and recycling of heavy metal ions can offer environmental protection and sustainable development. Here, we report the preparation of L-cysteine (L-cys)-doped glucose carbon sphere (GCS)@polypyrrole (PPy) composites (GCS@PPy/L-cys). The adsorption performance and mechanism of GCS@PPy/L-cys toward Cr(VI) from water were investigated in detail. The chromate enrichment on GCS@PPy is significantly facilitated by doping with L-cys, which prevents the oxidative collapse of the structure. This approach leads to many reduction–adsorption sites that reduce the highly hazardous Cr(VI) into less toxic Cr(III). More significantly, the composite can be reused to fabricate supercapacitors that avoid secondary pollution. This strategy offers high-efficiency treatment and sustainable utilization of hypervalent metals in water.
The design and synthesis of porous materials with novel structures and functional groups to prepare mixed matrix membranes (MMMs) is an effective way to break through trade-off effect of membrane technology. Here, hyper crosslinked polymers containing amino groups (HCPs-NH 2 ) with philic-CO 2 frame were successfully prepared for the fabrication of polyimide (PI)/HCPs-NH 2 MMMs. The separation performance of pure gas is studied in order to explore NH 2 groups facilitating CO 2 diffusion and transmission and enhancing CO 2 permeability. Consequently, the permeability of the PI/HCPs-NH 2 MMMs toward CO 2 and O 2 are 77.56 Barrer and 17.91 Barrer versus pure PI film toward CO 2 and O 2 (62.42 Barrer and 13.85 Barrer). The selectivity for CO 2 /CH 4 and O 2 /N 2 pairs is 24.44 and 4.01, and the selectivity of pure PI film toward CO 2 /CH 4 and O 2 /N 2 pairs is 20.76 and 3.29, respectively. The permeability and selectivity of PI/HCPs-NH 2 MMMs are higher than pure PI film breaking through the trade-off effect. Moreover, the PI/HCPs-NH 2 MMMs show better separation performance on the CO 2 /CH 4 pair than the O 2 /N 2 pair, indicating HCPs-NH 2 with philic-CO 2 frame plays a very important role in promoting CO 2 permeability. Thus, the PI/HCPs-NH 2 MMMs have potential applications in the field of natural gas purification.
Biochar adsorbents used to treat different heavy metals in water are efficient and low-cost. Appropriate raw materials, excellent selectivity and detailed adsorption mechanism are of important for research on biochar adsorbents. In this work, konjac starch was dispersed in polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) solution to prepare different sizes hydrophilic carbon spheres (HCSs) by hydrothermal synthesis method. Adsorption kinetics of the HCSs towards Pb2+ is described perfectly by the pseudo-second-order equation. With the temperature increasing, adsorption thermodynamics are more consistent with the Freundlich model. The calculated ΔG, ΔH and ΔS shows the adsorption of the HCSs towards Pb2+ is a spontaneous, endothermic and entropy increase process. In addition, HCSs have excellent selectivity for the adsorption of Pb2+ and Cu2+. HCSs prepared from konjac starch make full use of natural biomass resources, they can be used as a potential adsorbent material in treatment on heavy metal ion from water field.
Economic membrane technologies are a perennial hot topic in the field of natural gas purification and O2 enrichment. In this work, novel hyper cross-linked polymers (HCPs) incorporating 6-FDA based polyimide (PI) MMMs were prepared via a casting method for enhancing different gas transport (CO2, CH4, O2, and N2). The gas permeation experiments showed that compared with pure PI films, adding HCPs effectively promotes gas transport, increases gas permeability, and maintains ideal selectivity. The permeability of HCPs/PI MMMs toward CO2 and O2 was as high as 105.85 barrer and 24.03 barrer, respectively, and the ideal selectivity of CO2/CH4 and O2/N2 was 15.67 and 3.00, respectively. Molecular dynamic simulations further verified that adding HCPs was beneficial to gas transport thanks to large FFV of MMMs. Thus, HCPs have potential utility in the fabrication of MMMs for facilitating gas transport in the field of natural gas purification and O2 enrichment.
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