Characterization of vertically-oriented graphene nanosheets grown on copper substrate

Abstract

Vertical Graphene Nanosheets (VGNs) can be described as graphite sheet nanostructures with edges that are composed of stacks of planar graphene sheets standing almost vertically on the substrate. The present study reports VGNs synthesized on the copper foil substrate under 5 mTorr gas pressure and CH4/Ar plasma in an Electron Cyclotron Resonance – Chemical Vapor Deposition (ECR-CVD) reactor. Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) and Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) have been run to study the morphology of the VGNs which show a petal-like structure. The Raman spectrum shows two major fingerprints of graphene structures, G peak at 1570 cm−1 and G' peak at 2672 cm−1. The X-ray Diffraction (XRD) pattern of VGNs has four peaks which the main peak is C(0 0 2) and interlayer spacing found to be 0.34 nm. The Diffuse Reflectance result demonstrates a minimum reflectance at ∼270 nm which is apparently observable in the UV range of all graphene samples and drop of reflectance at ∼650 nm can be induced by the interaction of copper with VGNs structure and also it shows high absorptance value 90.42% which makes it a good candidate for solar selective absorber application.