Fabricating Graphene

Preparative methods of graphene are currently a heavily researched and important issue. The search for a methodology that can reproducibly generate high quality monolayer graphene sheets with large surface areas and large production volumes 

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The three most common methods of fabricating graphene-based polymer composites are described below. 

Due to the electrochemical instability of GO, GO-PANI composites cannot take advantage of the good properties of GO. Reduced GO would be more favorable for the preparation of PANI composites. Zhao et al. fabricated graphene/PANI nanofibre composites through an in situ polymerization of aniline monomer in the presence of GO under acid conditions, followed by the reduction of GO to graphene using hydrazine. The composite that contained 80 wt% rGO showed the highest specific capacitance of 480 F/g at a current density of 0.1 A/g. 

As highlighted in Chap. 1 GO is useful, in that, a common approach to fabricate graphene is to chemically, thermally or electrochemically reduce GO. Of note is work by Zhou et al. [105] who have reported the electrochemical reduction of GO films, which has resulted in a material that has a low O/C ratio. Such reduction proceeds via the following electrochemical process (where ER implies electrochemically reduced) ... 

It is evident, due to the above scenarios, that the electrochemistry of CVD grown graphene is highly fascinating. This section has also highlighted that materials scientists can beneficially utilise electrochemistry as a tool to assist in the characterisation of their fabricated graphene material. 

Characterise your fabricated graphene appropriately, especially to confirm that the material is indeed corresponding to the physicochemical characteristics of graphene (TEM and Raman spectroscopy for instance), along with the reporting the O/C ratio (XPS for example) and the presence (% quantity) or absence of surface defects if possible. 

Consider the effect that oxygenated species have on the electrochemical response the fabricated graphene may have specific surface groups present that give rise to beneficial responses, rather than that of true graphene [16, 18]. 

Besides chemical approaches, electrochemical polymerization has also been used for the preparation of conducting polymer-carbon material nanocomposites. Zhou et al. [69] have used electrochemical co-deposition method to fabricate graphene oxide-PPy nanocomposites. Graphene oxide synthesized from natural graphene is dispersed in pyrrole solution and electrodeposited onto the FTO conducting glasses in a galvanostatic mode. Electrochemical deposition of PPy with... 

Key words Nanoelectronics, Molecular electronics. Nanogap fabrication. Graphene, CNTs, Band gap, HOMO-LUMO, CNT-FET... 

In particular, a unique bottom-up approach for the fabrication of GNRs on the metallic surface with chemical precision through the selection of suitable oligophenylene precursors was developed. The concept is to fabricate graphene nanostmc-tures by the self-organization of carefully selected molecular building blocks (precursor monomers) that react with each... 

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