“MXene is one of the most sensitive gas sensors ever reported. This research is significant because it expands the range for detection of common gases allowing us to detect very low concentrations that we were not able to detect before,” said Yury Gogotsi, PhD, Distinguished University and Bach Professor in Drexel’s College of Engineering, who was a lead Drexel author of the study. “The high sensitivity of the device may be used for detecting toxic gases or pollutants found in our environment.”
Gogotsi’s Nanomaterials Research Group, from Drexel’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, teamed with Hee-Tae Jung, PhD, a professor at KAIST in Daejeon, South Korea to explore the gas-sensing properties of titanium carbide MXene. The key to its excellent scent-sleuthing capabilities is that MXene is both highly conductive and undergoes a measurable change of electrical conductivity in the presence of the chemical it’s designed to detect — and only when that particular chemical is present.
This discernment is called “signal-to-noise” ratio in the world of chemical sensors and it is used to rank the quality of sensors — picking up more signal and less noise is the goal. The ones in use today — mostly in medical settings to detect chemicals like acetone, ethanol and propanol, or in breathalyzers to detect alcohol — have a signal-to-noise ratio between 3-10, MXene’s is between 170 and 350, depending on the chemical.
“If the material can respond to gases by giving a strong signal, while simultaneously being conductive and achieving low electrical noise, the sensor can detect gases at very low concentrations because the signal-to-noise ratio is high — this is clearly the case with MXene,” Gogotsi said. “MXene can detect gases in the 50-100 parts per billion ranges, which is below the concentration necessary for current sensors to detect diabetes and a number of other health conditions.”
This level of sensitivity could be extremely important for detection of disease. In addition to ulcers and diabetes, breath analysis is currently being developed for early diagnosis of multiple types of cancer, cirrhosis, multiple sclerosis and kidney disease. If the chemical indicators for these diseases can be spotted in lower concentrations they are more likely to be diagnosed and treated at earlier stages.
MXene’s advantage over conventional sensor materials lies in its porous structure and chemical composition. The material is good at both allowing gas molecules to move across its surface and snagging, or adsorbing, certain ones that are chemically attracted to it, showing good selectivity.
Gogotsi’s team has been exploring MXenes since the material’s discovery at Drexel in 2011. The group has been able to create and study more than two dozen different chemical compositions for the material, which means they could be used to create sensors for a very wide variety of gasses.
In the future, Gogotsi suggests, MXene sensors could play an important role in environmental monitoring, energy harvesting and storage, as well as health care.
“The next step to advance this research will be to develop sensor sensitivity to different types of gases and improve the detection selectivity between different gases,” Gogotsi said. “We can also imagine personal sensors that will be in our smart phones or fitness trackers, monitoring body functions and the environment while we work, sleep or exercise, accessible with a tap of a finger. Improving the detection sensitivity with new materials is the first step toward making these devices a reality.”
Paper describing this research was selected as Editors’ Choice (less than 1% of articles published by ACS get this honor) and published as an Open Access article: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.7b07460
Source: http://drexel.edu/now/archive/2018/February/MXene-gas-sensor/
Congratulations and thank you to our collaborators from TU Wien and CEST for very interesting work and making it published! In this work, an upscalable electrochemical MXene synthesis is presented. Yields of up to 60% electrochemical MXene (EC-MXene) with no byproducts from a single exfoliation cycle are achieved.
Thank you to our collaborators for the amazing joint work recently published in Graphene and 2D Nanomaterials about MXene–silk fibroin composite films aiming to develop materials with tunable electronic and thermal properties
Congratulations to all collaborators with this interesting joint work!
Dr. Oleksiy Gogotsi, director of MRC and Carbon-Ukraine, innovative companies that are among the leaders on the world MXene market, visited 2024 MRS Fall Meeting & Exhibit. together with Dr. Maksym Pogorielov, Head of Advanced Biomaterials and Biophysics Laboratory, University of Latvia.
MRC and Carbon-Ukraine team visited the 3rd International MXene conference held at Drexel University on August 5-8, 2024. Conference brought together the best reserchers and leading experts on MXene field. 
Together with colleagues from the University of Latvia, MRC/Carbone Ukraine, Adam Mickiewicz University, University Clinic Essen, and others, we have developed a novel concept involving the binding of antibodies to MXenes. In our research, we utilized anti-CEACAM1 antibodies to develop targeted photo-thermal therapy for melanoma (in vitro), paving the way for future in vivo studies and clinical trials. For the first time, we demonstrate the feasibility of delivering MXenes specifically targeted to melanoma cells, enabling the effective ablation of cancer cells under near-infrared (NIR) light. This new technique opens up vast potential for the application of MXenes in cancer treatment, diagnostics, drug delivery, and many other medical purposes.
Here we demonstrate a new developed method for depositing Ti3C2Tx MXenes onto hydrophobic electrospun PCL membranes using oxygen plasma treatment. These novel patches hold tremendous potential for providing mechanical support to damaged heart tissue and enabling electrical signal transmission,thereby mimicking the crucial electroconductivity required for normal cardiac function. After a detailed investigation of scaffold-to-cell interplay, including electrical stimulation, novel technology has the potential for clinical application not only for cardiac regeneration, but also as neural and muscular tissue substitutes.
MX-MAP project participants from MRC Dr. Oleksiy Gogotsi and Veronika Zahorodna performed split secondment visit to project partner organization University of Padova (Italy). MX-MAP project works on development of the key strategies for MXene medical applications. 
CanbioSe Project Meeting and Project Workshop was held at European Institute of Membranes (IEM), University of Montpellier, France on September 26-27, 2023. The workshop was focused on the theme of "Commercializing Biosensors, Intellectual Property, and Knowledge Transfer from Academia to Industry.
Dr. Oleksiy Gogotsi and Veronika Zahorodna visited IEEE NAP 2023 conference held in Bratislava on September 10-15, 2023. The prime focus of the IEEE NAP-2023 was on nanoscale materials with emphasis on interdisciplinary research exploring and exploiting their unique physical and chemical proprieties for practical applications.
Director of MRC and Carbon-Ukraine Dr. Oleksiy Gogotsi visited CEST labs in Wiener Neustadt (Low Energy Ion Scattering, Batteries development) and TU Vienna (ELSA, SFA). He meet with Dr. Pierluigi Bilotto, Dr. Chriatian Pichler and their colleagues, discussing novel materials and r&d activities for new technologies.