High Potential Electrochemical Synthesis of Thermally Reduced Graphene Nanomaterial

Abstract

In this study, we provide electrochemical techniques for synthesizing thermally reduced graphene nanomaterial that have high potential, low defects, cost-effectiveness, and ecological sustainability. The electrochemical exfoliation is carried out by employing a 195 W DC (voltage = 60[Formula: see text]V and current = 3.25 A) power source at a maximum electrolyte temperature of about 92.5∘C within the aqueous suspension of 2[Formula: see text]M of sulfuric acid (H2SO[Formula: see text]. Thereafter, the synthesized nanomaterial was treated in the weak piranha [combination of sulfuric acid and hydrogen peroxide (H2O[Formula: see text]] solution using an electrochemical technique inside the water bath sonicator at 80∘C. X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis shows the peak of diffraction to the (002) plane of the reduced graphene oxide (RGO) samples emerges at around 2[Formula: see text] and 26.56∘ with an interplanar distance of 3.40 Å and 3.54 Å. According to the XRD data, after the high-temperature thermal reduction phase, the structure of the crystals and interplanar separation were recovered. The size of the crystallite of RGO produced under H2SO4 conditions was discovered to be greater than the crystallite size of graphene oxide produced under piranha solution conditions. The Raman analysis results show that the degree of disorder of the graphene synthesized within the H2O2 was higher than in comparison to the graphene synthesized in H2SO4. Field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE-SEM) results show that graphene synthesized in the presence of H2O2 has a thin and porous microstructure in comparison to H2SO4 with no significant effect on the presence of the availability of the C/O ratio. The atomic force microscopy (AFM) analysis indicates that the surface roughness of the graphene synthesized in the H2O2 was higher than that of the H2SO4. The Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR spectroscopy) analytical results show that the majority of the functional groups have been eliminated within the samples.