Liquid phase production of graphene by exfoliation of graphite in surfactant/water solutions

By Y. Hernández, Mustafa Lotya, V. Nicolosi, F. Blighe, S. De, Georg S. Duesberg, Jonathan N. Coleman. 2008

1,926 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We have demonstrated a method to disperse and exfoliate graphite to give graphene suspended in water-surfactant solutions. Optical characterisation of these suspensions allowed the partial optimisation of the dispersion process. Transmission electron microscopy showed the dispersed phase to consist of small graphitic flakes. More than 40% of these flakes had <5 layers with ~3% of flakes consisting of monolayers. These flakes are stabilised against reaggregation by Coulomb repulsion due to the adsorbed surfactant. However, the larger flakes tend to sediment out over ~6 weeks, leaving only small flakes dispersed. It is possible to form thin films by vacuum filtration of these dispersions. Raman and IR spectroscopic analysis of these films suggests the flakes to be largely free of defects and oxides. The deposited films are reasonably conductive and are semi-transparent. Further improvements may result in the development of cheap transparent conductors.

Subfields: Materials Chemistry, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/505abf19d9bdea725df8b98bbf0ad62ad38ca79b

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Citations in the corpus

Production and processing of graphene and related materials (2020, background): “Functionalization in dispersion Graphene can be exfoliated in water with the help of amphiphilic surfactants [182, 184].”
The use of surfactants for dispersing carbon nanotubes and graphene to make conductive nanocomposites (2012, background): “Smith [21], Sun [22] and Lotya [7] provided a big contribution to the understanding of stabilization mechanism of CNTs/water and graphene/ water dispersions for various ionic aswell as anionic surfactants.”
Graphene mode-locked ultrafast laser. (2009, methodology): “This retains the electronic structure of pristine graphene in the exfoliated SLG and FLG flakes.(17,18) We employ bile salts in order to obtain a stable, higher concentration of SLG and FLG than in previous nonaqueous dispersions.”