Assembling of graphene oxide in an isolated dissolving droplet

Abstract

Controlling of the morphology and assembly of graphene oxide (GO) is important in the structure design of carbon materials using GO sheets as building blocks. In this work, we have studied GO assembling driven by the dissolution of a droplet immersed in a surrounding liquid phase. The as-assembled GO structures were highly crumpled with exotic morphology, which we refer to as GO snowballs. The detailed structure of GO snowballs was closely related to the dissolution dynamics of the droplet, which could be adjusted by the composition of the surrounding liquid.