The importance of repulsive potential barriers for the dispersion of graphene using surfactants
By Ronan J. Smith, Mustafa Lotya, Jonathan N. Coleman. 2010
295 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We have dispersed graphene in water, stabilized by a range of 12 ionic and non-ionic surfactants. In all cases, the degree of exfoliation, as characterized by flake length and thickness, was similar. The dispersed flakes were typically 750 nm long and, on average, four layers thick. However, the dispersed concentration varied from solvent to solvent. For the ionic surfactants, the concentration scaled with the square of the zeta potential of the surfactant-coated flakes. This suggests that the concentration is proportional to the magnitude of the electrostatic potential barrier, which stabilizes surfactant-coated flakes against aggregation. For the non-ionic surfactants, the dispersed graphene concentration scaled linearly with the magnitude of the steric potential barrier stabilizing the flakes. However, the data suggested that other contributions are also important.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Materials Chemistry, Physical and Theoretical Chemistry
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c8e9fdf779e9f1303045d7bcb783272656f415a8
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Citations in the corpus
- The use of surfactants for dispersing carbon nanotubes and graphene to make conductive nanocomposites (2012, methodology): “This is the electrostatic potential at the edge of the layer of bound tail groups [20,21].”
- Guidelines for Exfoliation, Characterization and Processing of Layered Materials Produced by Liquid Exfoliation (2017, unknown): “In this case, the surfactant head group interacts with the liquid environment and prevents the nanosheets from reaggregation by electrostatic and/or steric repulsion.(54) Popular aqueous surfactants include sodium cholate (SC) or related bile salts, sodium dodecyl benzyl sulfonate (SDBS), sodium dod”