Although multifunctional, flexible, and wearable textiles with integrated smart electronics have attracted tremendous attention in recent years, it is still an issue to balance new functionalities with the inherent performances of the textile substrates. 2D early transition metal carbides/nitrides (MXenes) are considered as ideal nanosheets for fabricating multifunctional and flexible textiles on the basis of their superb intrinsic electrical conductivity, tunable surface chemistry, and layered structure. Herein, highly conductive and hydrophobic textiles with exceptional electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding efficiency and excellent Joule heating performance are fabricated by depositing in situ polymerized polypyrrole (PPy) modified MXene sheets onto poly(ethylene terephthalate) textiles followed by a silicone coating. The resultant multifunctional textile exhibits high electrical conductivity of ≈1000 S m −1 in conjunction with an exceptional EMI shielding efficiency of ≈90 dB at a thickness of 1.3 mm. The thin silicone coating renders the hydrophilic PPy/MXene-decorated textile hydrophobic, leading to an excellent water-resistant feature while retaining a satisfactory air permeability of the textile. Interestingly, the multifunctional textile also exhibits an excellent mode rate voltage-driven Joule heating performance. Thus, the deposition of PPy-modified MXene followed by silicone coating creates a multifunctional textile that holds great promise for wearable intelligent garments, EMI shielding, and personal heating applications.

this promising prospect is hindered by quite a few challenges in Li-S cells. The fi rst one is the intrinsically low electronic conductivity of sulfur (5 × 10 −30 S cm −1 ) and its end discharge products Li 2 S/Li 2 S 2 , which limits the full utilization of sulfur. [ 7 ] Accordingly, downsizing sulfur to nanosize particles and adding a large amount of carbon have been proposed to address the above issue. However, these methods unfortunately sacrifi ce the energy density of the Li-S cells. [ 2,6 ] In particular, high fractions of light carbon materials like porous carbon or carbon nanotube (CNT) do not contribute to the capacity at all but signifi cantly lower the volmetric energy density, which is undesired for higheffi cient portable devices or EV energy storage applications. [ 8 ] The second and more detrimental issue that limits Li-S cell performance is the formation of soluble long-chain polysulfi des such as Li 2 S 8 and Li 2 S 6 , which easily diffuse out of High energy and cost-effective lithium sulfur (Li-S) battery technology has been vigorously revisited in recent years due to the urgent need of advanced energy storage technologies for green transportation and large-scale energy storage applications. However, the market penetration of Li-S batteries has been plagued due to the gap in scientifi c knowledge between the fundamental research and the real application need. Here, a facile and effective approach to integrate commercial carbon nanoparticles into microsized secondary ones for application in high loading sulfur electrodes is proposed The slurry with the integrated particles is easily cast into electrode laminates with practically usable mass loadings. Uniform and crack-free coating with high loading of 2-8 mg cm −2 sulfur are successfully achieved. Based on the obtained thick electrodes, the dependence of areal specifi c capacity on mass loading, factors infl uencing electrode performance, and measures used to address the existing issues are studied and discussed.

Highly conductive polymer nanocomposites are greatly desired for electro magnetic interference (EMI) shielding applications. Although transition metal carbide/carbonitride (MXene) has shown its huge potential for producing highly conductive films and bulk materials, it still remains a great challenge to fabricate extremely conductive polymer nanocomposites with outstanding EMI shielding performance at minimal amounts of MXenes. Herein, an electrostatic assembly approach for fabricating highly conductive MXene@ polystyrene nanocomposites by electrostatic assembling of negative MXene nanosheets on positive polystyrene microspheres is demonstrated, fol lowed by compression molding. Thanks to the high conductivity of MXenes and their highly efficient conducting network within polystyrene matrix, the resultant nanocomposites exhibit not only a low percolation threshold of 0.26 vol% but also a superb conductivity of 1081 S m −1 and an outstanding EMI shielding performance of >54 dB over the whole Xband with a max imum of 62 dB at the low MXene loading of 1.90 vol%, which are among the best performances for electrically conductive polymer nanocomposites by far. Moreover, the same nanocomposite has a highly enhanced storage modulus, 54% and 56% higher than those of neat polystyrene and conven tional MXene@polystyrene nanocomposite, respectively. This work provides a novel methodology to produce highly conductive polymer nanocomposites for highly efficient EMI shielding applications.

2D transition metal carbides and nitrides (MXenes) have gained extensive attention recently due to their versatile surface chemistry, layered structure, and intriguing properties. The assembly of MXene sheets into macroscopic architectures is an important approach to harness their extraordinary properties. However, it is difficult to construct a freestanding, mechanically flexible, and 3D framework of MXene sheets owing to their weak intersheet interactions. Herein, an interfacial enhancement strategy to construct multifunctional, superelastic, and lightweight 3D MXene architectures by bridging individual MXene sheets with polyimide macromolecules is developed. The resulting lightweight aerogel exhibits superelasticity with large reversible compressibility, excellent fatigue resistance (1000 cycles at 50% strain), 20% reversible stretchability, and high electrical conductivity of ≈4.0 S m−1. The outstanding mechanical flexibility and electrical conductivity make the aerogel promising for damping, microwave absorption coating, and flexible strain sensor. More interestingly, an exceptional microwave absorption performance with a maximum reflection loss of −45.4 dB at 9.59 GHz and a wide effective absorption bandwidth of 5.1 GHz are achieved.

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