Comparative study on chemical reduction of free-standing flexible GO films and their cyclic voltammetry performance

Abstract

Chemical reduction of graphene oxide (GO) is one of the most practical methods to recover the properties of graphene. However, these properties vary with the reduction agents. Understanding these differences is fundamental to applications related to reduced graphene oxide (RGO). In this work, six different reduction agents were used to make flexible and free-standing RGO films, resulting in different properties such as surface morphology, inner structure, surface C/O ratio, electrical conductivity, and wettability. We found that not all the six reduction agents were suitable for making flexible and free-standing films. Then, we further studied the electrochemical behavior of these samples and found that the electrochemical properties of the RGO films depend on all the properties but electrical conductivity played the most important role in determining the pseudocapacitance behavior.