Abstract
Assembling titanium carbide MXene nanosheets into macroscopic high-performance fibers is very challenging because of the voids caused by transverse wrinkles, hindering their practical applications in wearable smart textiles. Here we continuously fabricate ultrastrong MXene fibers by coaxial-wet-spinning-assisted radial confining integrated with roll-to-roll-assisted axial stretching under near room temperature. Wet-spun MXene fibers are bridged with calcium ions and radially confined to reduce the voids resulting from transverse wrinkles by an in-situ bridged sodium alginate encapsulation layer, followed by stretching to axially align nanosheets. The resultant MXene fibers provide record tensile strength (958 MPa) and electrical conductivity (13,692 S cm-1). Large-area textiles made from the MXene fibers present extraordinary electromagnetic interference shielding capacity (6,509 dB cm-1). The proposed strategy opens an avenue for scalable assembling other two-dimensional nanosheets into high-performance fibers.
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All data supporting the findings of this study are available in the manuscript and its Supplementary Information. All raw data are fully and freely available from the corresponding authors. Source data are provided with this paper.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholars (52522303, S.W.), the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars (52125302, Q.C.), the Beijing Nova Program (20230484326, S.W.), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2021YFA0715700, Q.C.), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52373066 (S.W.), 52550002 (Q.C.), and 82201021 (Y.C.)), the Suzhou Key Laboratory of Bioinspired Interfacial Science (SZ2024004, Q.C.), the Open Research Fund of Suzhou Laboratory (SZLAB-1108-2024-ZD002, Q.C.), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (BMU2025PYJH002, Y.C.), National College Students’ Innovation and Entrepreneurship Training Program (202410006358, G.X.), and the New Cornerstone Science Foundation through the XPLORER PRIZE (Q.C.). We thank the Analysis and Testing Center of Beihang University, the High-Performance Computing Platform at Beihang University, and the Physical and Chemical Analysis Center at Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research, University of Science and Technology of China.
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Q.C. supervised the project. S.W. and Q.C. conceived the idea and designed the experiments. C.H., Y.C., T.Z., and S.W. performed the experiments and characterizations. G.X., M.L., and W.L. helped in the large-scale fabrication of CSM fibers and textiles. E.G. and Y.W. performed theoretical simulations. Y.C. and X.D. performed cytotoxicity evaluation. C.H., Y.C., X.D., S.W., and Q.C. co-wrote the manuscript. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.
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Huang, C., Chen, Y., Zhang, T. et al. Continuous MXene fibers with near-gigapascal tensile strength via radial confinement and axial stretching. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-68038-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-68038-z
