Event Details

2025 Royal Society of Chemistry prize winner Professor Valeria Nicolosi from Trinity College Dublin delivers a guest lecture 2D nanomaterials devices. Also available on Teams.

Abstract: Liquid phase exfoliation has been proven to be a cheap, scalable method for the mass production of 2D sheets. This talk will first discuss the galaxy of existent layered materials, with emphasis on synthesis, liquid-phase exfoliation, and characterisation, focusing on some key applications recently developed in our laboratories, ranging from energy storage to printed electronics.

We will, for example, discuss how two-dimensional nanomaterials can be formulated in aqueous and organic viscous inks for extrusion printing, inkjet printing, and aerosoljet 3D printing, and demonstrate direct printing on various substrates. The additive- and binary solvent-free inks do not show coffee ring effect, enabling high-resolution printing without substrate pre-treatment. The resulting printed micro-supercapacitors showcase excellent charge storage performance, including areal capacitance up to 100 mF/cm² and volumetric capacitance up to 800 F/cm³ in protic gel electrolyte, coupled with long lifetime and good flexibility. The versatile direct-ink-printing technique highlights the promise of 2D nanomaterials functional inks for scalable fabrication of easy-to-integrate components of printable electronics. In this talk, we will also demonstrate how such inks can be used to develop novel nanomaterials-based battery solutions.

Increasing the energy storage capability of batteries necessitates maximisation of their areal capacity. This requires thick electrodes performing at near-theoretical specific capacity. However, achievable electrode thicknesses are restricted by mechanical instabilities, with high-thickness performance limited by the attainable electrode conductivity. Here we show that forming a segregated network composite of carbon nanotubes with a range of lithium storage materials (for example, silicon, graphite and metal oxide particles) suppresses mechanical instabilities by toughening the composite, allowing the fabrication of high-performance electrodes with thicknesses of up to 800 μm. Such composite electrodes display conductivities up to 1 × 104 S m⁻¹ and low charge-transfer resistances, allowing fast charge-delivery and enabling near-theoretical specific capacities, even for thick electrodes. The combination of high thickness and specific capacity leads to areal capacities of up to 45 and 30 mAh cm⁻² for anodes and cathodes, respectively. Combining optimised composite anodes and cathodes yields full cells with state-of-the-art areal capacities (29 mAh cm⁻²) and specific/volumetric energies (480 Wh kg⁻¹ and 1,600 Wh l⁻¹).

About the speaker: Valeria Nicolosi holds the position of Professor of Nanomaterials and Advanced Microscopy at the School of Chemistry at Trinity College Dublin. She is a distinguished nanotechnologist whose expertise lies in the realm of low-dimensional nanostructures and high-end electron microscopy.

She is a Principal Investigator in the Research Ireland-funded research centres AMBER (The National Centre for Advanced Materials and BioEngineering Research) and IForm (The National Centre for additive manufacturing).

Prof. Nicolosi is an eight-time ERC awardee (StG in 2011, followed by 3 PoC grants to bring results of frontier research closer to the market, a CoG in 2016, followed by 3 further PoC grants in 2019, 2022 and 2025).

Prof. Nicolosi served as an Advisory Board member of the European Innovation Council (EIC) from 2019 to 2021, and she is currently an Ambassador for the EIC and ERC.

Prof. Nicolosi's research encompasses the synthesis, exfoliation, and characterization of two-dimensional materials, with a specific emphasis on applications in energy storage. She actively employs advanced electron microscopy techniques, including aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy (TEM), scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS), and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), to investigate material properties. Her prolific contributions to the field are reflected in the publication of more than 250 papers, which have garnered over 55,000 citations, and an H-index of 79. Notably, she has been repeatedly recognised as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics, receiving this distinction every year since 2018.

Aspects of her research have been licensed to companies like Thomas Swann, Samsung, Intel, Lego, Ferrari, etc.

As a recognition of her career achievements, in 2021 Prof. Nicolosi was conferred the honorary decoration of “Cavaliere” in the Order “Stella d’Italia” by the President of the Italian Republic, at the proposal of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In August 2024, the Irish Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science appointed Prof. Nicolosi to the Board of the newly announced Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland founding agency, with a four-year term. This new agency merges Science Foundation Ireland and the Irish Research Council and has the remit to fund research and innovation excellence in all disciplines across the spectrum of Arts, Engineering, Humanities, Mathematics, Science, Social Sciences, Technology and others.

Venue: Frankland LT (Faraday Complex) and via Microsoft Teams – join here