1 research outputs found
Highly Conductive and Transparent Reduced Graphene Oxide Nanoscale Films via Thermal Conversion of Polymer-Encapsulated Graphene Oxide Sheets
Despite
noteworthy progress in the fabrication of large-area graphene sheetlike
nanomaterials, the vapor-based processing still requires sophisticated
equipment and a multistage handling of the material. An alternative
approach to manufacturing functional graphene-based films includes
the employment of graphene oxide (GO) micrometer-scale sheets as precursors.
However, search for a scalable manufacturing technique for the production
of high-quality GO nanoscale films with high uniformity and high electrical
conductivity is still continuing. Here we show that conventional dip-coating
technique can offer fabrication of high quality mono- and bilayered
films made of GO sheets. The method is based on our recent discovery
that encapsulating individual GO sheets in a nanometer thick molecular
brush copolymer layer allows for the nearly perfect formation of the
GO layers via dip coating from water. By thermal reduction the bilayers
(cemented by a carbon-forming polymer linker) are converted into highly
conductive and transparent reduced GO films with a high conductivity
up to 10<sup>4</sup> S/cm and optical transparency on the level of
90%. The value is the highest electrical conductivity reported for
thermally reduced nanoscale GO films and is close to the conductivity
of indium tin oxide currently in use for transparent electronic devices,
thus making these layers intriguing candidates for replacement of
ITO films