Graphene-enabled adaptive infrared textiles

Interactive clothing requires sensing and display functionalities to be embedded on textiles. Despite the significant progress of electronic textiles, the integration of optoelectronic materials on fabrics remains as an outstanding challenge. In this Letter, using the electro-optical tunability of graphene, we report adaptive optical textiles with electrically controlled reflectivity and emissivity covering the infrared and near-infrared wavelengths. We achieve electro-optical modulation by reversible intercalation of ions into graphene layers laminated on fabrics. We demonstrate a new class of infrared textile devices including display, yarn, and stretchable devices using natural and synthetic textiles. To show the promise of our approach, we fabricated an active device directly onto a t-shirt, which enables long-wavelength infrared communication via modulation of the thermal radiation from the human body. The results presented here provide complementary technologies which could leverage the ubiquitous use of functional textiles

A New Metal-Free Carbon Hybrid for Enhanced Photocatalysis

Carbon nitride (C3N4) is a layered, stable, and polymeric metal-free material that has been discovered as a visible-light-response photocatalyst. Owing to C3N4 having a higher conduction band position, most previous studies have been focused on its reduction capability for solar fuel production, such as hydrogen generation from water splitting or hydrocarbon production from CO2.However, photooxidation ability of g-C3N4 is weak and has been less explored, especially for decomposition of chemically stable phenolics. Carbon spheres prepared by a hydrothermal carbonization of glucose have been widely applied as a support material or template due to their interesting physicochemical properties and the functional groups on the reactive surface. This study demonstrated that growth of carbon nanospheres onto g-C3N4 (CN-CS) can significantly increase the photooxidation ability (to about 4.79 times higher than that of pristine g-C3N4) in phenol degradation under artificial sunlight irradiations. The crystal structure, optical property, morphology, surface groups, recombination rate of electron/hole pairs, and thermal stability of CN-CS were investigated by a variety of characterization techniques. This study contributes to the further promising applications of carbon nitride in metal-free catalysis