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MXenes have drawn considerable attention in the past decade, thanks to their attractive properties such as metallic conductivity and surface hydrophilicity. While MXenes form highly stable dispersions in water, it can act as a limitation for certain applications such as photoactive layer in photovoltaic devices. In this work, delaminated MXenes of aqueous solution type Ti3C2 were prepared first, and then we have used a solvent-exchange technique to prepare suspensions of MXenes in three polar aprotic solvents namely, DMSO, DMF and NMP. Upon spin-coating under the same conditions, each solvent variation yields a different thin film morphology – in terms of particle size and surface coverage, as evidenced from AFM investigations. While the MXenes in DMSO yielded large aggregated particles with µm-sized islands in the film, MXenes in DMF and NMP were found to form films with well-dispersed MXene sheets in the size range 250 nm-50 nm and 80 nm-10 nm, respectively. This study also provides additional insights into the microstructure and opto-electronic properties of the MXene thin films using correlative Raman microscopy and photoluminescence spectroscopy. The information provided by this study on the variation in the properties depending on the solvent used to process and spin-cast the films are important for evaluating MXenes in thin film device applications.
Keywords: MXenes, spin-coating, thin-film microstructure, atomic force microscopy, photoluminescence, polar aprotic solvents© This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.