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Rational designed of graphene dispersant

Zhang, Junru

[Thesis]. Manchester, UK: The University of Manchester; 2016.

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Abstract

In this work a novel pyrene based stabiliser has been synthesised in order to increase the production of higher quality graphene in aqueous liquid phase exfoliation. A comparative investigation of liquid phase exfoliation of graphene in water by using designed pyrene stabiliser sodium 4-(pyren-1-yl)butane-1-sulphonate (Py-C4-SASS) and commercially available 1-pyrenesulfonic acid sodium salt (Py-SASS). The graphene dispersion produced with the novel stabiliser (Py-C4-SASS) achieves a high concentration of ~1 mg mL-1. In comparison to the commercially available stabiliser (Py-SASS) which produces a dispersion 0.4 mg mL-1 under the same experimental conditions. Raman spectroscopy shows both graphene dispersions contain few layer graphene flakes, however the flake size distribution shows that with Py-C4-SASS as the exfoliation agent the dispersion produces larger graphene flakes (~ 0.4 μm) compared to the Py-SASS graphene dispersion (~ 0.2 μm). A conductivity test is performed to compare the sheet resistance of two graphene inkjet-printed patterns, the results show that the pattern produced from Py-C4-SASS dispersions has lower sheet resistance (~ 83.76 kΩ/sq) compared to the Py-SASS graphene dispersions(~ 170.21 kΩ/sq). These results suggest that the newly designed stabiliser Py-C4-SASS enhances the performance in assisting with the liquid phase exfoliation of graphene in water compare to the commercially available stabiliser Py-SASS. This might be because the insertion of a butyl spacer between pyrene aromatic unit and sulfonic acid sodium group could let the hydrophilic group and aromatic moiety of this molecule work more independently.