Effect of static pressure on ultrasonic liquid phase exfoliation of few-layer graphene

Abstract

Ultrasonic Liquid Phase Exfoliation (LPE) has gathered attention from both scientific and industrial communities for its accessibility and cost-effectiveness in producing graphene. However, this technique has faced challenges such as low yield and long production time. In this study, we developed a cyclic ultrasonication system to exfoliate expanded graphite (EG) by applying static pressure to a flow chamber to address these challenges. Using deionized water (DIW) as solvent and polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) as dispersion, we obtained graphene slurries with an average lateral size of 7 μm and averaged number of layers of 3.5 layers, after 40 min of ultrasonication. After centrifugation, the yield of single and bilayer graphene was approximately 16 %. The findings showed that regulating hydrostatic pressure can effectively affect the lateral size and number of layers of few-layer graphene. The proposed method is of good potential for scaled-up production of few-layer graphene.