THE MELODIES OF MATERIALS

There's a certain kind of material that shows up in research and immediately makes you think: why didn't we find this sooner? MXenes are that material for me. Every time I dig deeper into the literature, I find another application, another unexpected property, another paper that makes me want to drop everything and spend an afternoon reading. That doesn't happen often. It's happening a lot with MXenes. So let's talk about them.

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What Even Is a MXene?

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Pronounce it "maxene." That clears up the first confusion.

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MXenes are a family of ultra-thin materials, just a few atoms thick, made up of transition metal carbides, nitrides, or carbonitrides. The name comes from combining "MAX phases" (the layered minerals they're made from) with the suffix "ene," borrowed from graphene [1]. That graphene comparison is intentional. Like graphene, MXenes exist in essentially two dimensions, giving them a massive surface area relative to their size and a completely different set of properties than their bulk counterparts.

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The origin story is a good one. In the summer of 2010, Mohammad Naguib, a PhD student at Drexel University, was trying to make a MAX phase material work as a lithium-ion battery electrode. It wasn't cooperating. His advisers suggested etching out one of the layers using hydrofluoric acid. What happened next was, by Naguib's own account, alarming. Everything in the container bubbled up and spilled. He shut the fume hood and waited. When the smoke cleared, he had a black powder. Under a microscope, it turned out to be stacks of ultra-thin sheets. He thought he had made graphene. Chemical analysis revealed something entirely new [1]. The first paper was published in 2011, and within a few years, labs around the world were studying the material.

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Since then, more than 50 MXene compositions have been confirmed, with computers predicting thousands more [1]. Around 70,000 scientists across more than 100 countries now work on MXenes [1]. For a material that didn't exist 15 years ago, that's a remarkable trajectory.

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The Properties That Make Researchers Excited

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Here's what makes MXenes unusual: they combine properties that don't normally coexist in the same material.

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Most highly conductive materials are rigid and hard to work with in flexible devices. Most materials that play nicely with living cells are poor conductors. MXenes manage to do multiple things well at once, not because they're a compromise, but because their chemistry genuinely supports a wide range of behaviors [1].

A big part of why comes down to their surfaces. MXenes are covered in functional groups, clusters of atoms like hydroxyl, oxygen, and fluorine, that can be chemically adjusted depending on what you need the material to do. Change the surface chemistry and you can shift MXene behavior from metallic to semiconductor-like. This tunability is what makes a single class of materials relevant to battery research, cancer therapy, and wearable electronics all at the same time [1].

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They're also hydrophilic, meaning they disperse easily in water without needing complicated chemical treatments. You can make MXene inks, spray them onto surfaces, soak them into fabrics. That ease of processing is one of the things that separates them from a lot of other nanomaterials that are scientifically interesting but practically difficult to work with [1].

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Energy Storage

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This is where MXene research started, and the evidence base here is the deepest. The layered structure, large surface area, and chemically active surfaces of Ti3C2 make it well suited for supercapacitor electrodes and battery anodes, particularly for lithium-ion and sodium-ion batteries [2].

Sodium-ion batteries have attracted real interest lately because sodium is far more abundant and cheaper than lithium, making them an attractive option for large-scale energy storage if the performance gap can be narrowed. MXenes are one of the more promising materials being explored for that [2].

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There's also a green hydrogen angle. In 2016, Gogotsi, Anasori, and colleagues at Drexel first demonstrated molybdenum carbide MXenes as catalysts for splitting water to produce hydrogen. The goal is to eventually replace platinum, currently the best but extremely expensive catalyst for this process, with something that performs comparably at a fraction of the cost [1].

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Electromagnetic Shielding: The Killer App?

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This one surprised me when I first came across it, but according to Naguib and Gogotsi themselves, electromagnetic shielding is the application they believe MXenes are most likely to transform first [1].

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Electronic and medical devices need shields that block harmful radiation and prevent interference from outside signals. Right now those shields are typically made from copper or aluminum. MXenes, it turns out, can outperform both metals at the same thickness, thanks to their high conductivity and layered structure. A film of Ti3C2 just a couple of micrometers thick can absorb nearly all radiation in a relevant frequency range [1].

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What makes this practically exciting is how MXene shields are made. Instead of rolling and cutting metal, you spray them on. Gogotsi's group has soaked cotton and linen in MXene solutions to make radiation-shielding fabrics. Drexel researchers also showed that spray-on MXene antennas work as well as conventional patterned copper antennas at a fraction of the thickness [1]. For consumer electronics, wearables, and medical devices, that's a meaningful advantage.

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Biomedical Applications

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This is personally my favorite corner of MXene research, and the area that's moved the fastest in recent years.

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Certain MXenes can absorb light and convert it to heat with remarkable efficiency. Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology found that Ti3C2 converts visible light to heat at essentially 100% efficiency [1]. The potential application in cancer therapy is significant: direct the material to a tumor site and use light to heat and destroy it from within, without the collateral damage of conventional treatments.

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MXenes have also shown promise in tissue engineering. Because they conduct electricity, they can support the growth of electrically active tissues like cardiac and neural cells in ways that most biocompatible materials simply cannot [2].

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In July 2025, Drexel announced a three-year, $5 million collaboration with Khalifa University in the UAE, the University of Padua in Italy, and Carbon-Ukraine, a Kyiv-based MXene manufacturing company. The project has two goals: using MXenes for water desalination in arid regions threatened by climate change, and improving cell labeling and tracking technology for medical diagnostics [3]. That a single material is being pursued simultaneously for both of those problems tells you something about how broad its potential is.

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Wearable Sensors

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The same flexibility and conductivity that make MXenes interesting for biomedical applications also make them attractive for wearable electronics. Researchers have been developing MXene-based sensors capable of detecting pressure, strain, temperature, humidity, and trace gases, all while remaining thin and flexible enough to be worn on skin or woven into fabric [4].

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The vision is continuous, real-time health monitoring without the bulk and rigidity of conventional devices. MXenes aren't the only material being explored for this, but their combination of sensitivity, processability, and flexibility puts them near the front of the field [4].

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What​ Still Needs to be Done

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For all the excitement, the field is straightforward about its open problems.

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Consistency is the biggest one. MXene quality varies significantly from lab to lab, and there's no standardized production process that guarantees the same properties across batches [1]. The MXene Association, launched in 2021, is working to establish those standards.

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Stability is another challenge. MXenes can degrade when exposed to air and water over time, which complicates long-term device performance. And the traditional synthesis route uses hydrofluoric acid, a highly corrosive chemical that creates real safety concerns at scale. Greener synthesis approaches are being actively developed [2].

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A 2025 study from Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin added an interesting layer: by measuring individual MXene flakes for the first time rather than stacked layers, researchers found that properties vary significantly at the single-flake level in ways that bulk measurements had been missing entirely [5]. It's a reminder that even the foundational understanding of how these materials behave is still being refined.

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As Naguib himself put it: "The only bottleneck now is to find the killer application that requires tons of the material" [1].

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Why I Keep Coming Back to This

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Materials science at its best is about discovering that the rules you thought applied don't. MXenes keep doing that. They were found by accident, with no prior prediction that they could exist. They outperform metals in electromagnetic shielding at a fraction of the thickness. They convert light to heat at 100% efficiency. They conduct electricity and support living cells at the same time.

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And unlike a lot of fields where the foundational questions were answered long before any of us arrived, MXene research is young enough that the important discoveries are genuinely still ahead. The gap between what's been demonstrated in a lab and what's reached a commercial product is still enormous, and closing it will require chemistry, biology, engineering, and a lot of creative thinking.

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That's a field worth paying attention to. So until dhin . . . stay upbeat, and stay tuned.​​

Local Kid on the National Stage - 39th ACS NMCS, 2026