SMA-Assisted Exfoliation of Graphite by Microfluidization for Efficient and Large-Scale Production of High-Quality Graphene.

Yuzhou Wang,Xingxiang Zhang,Xianye Zhang,Haihui Liu

doi:10.3390/nano9121653

Abstract

In this paper, the sodium salt of styrene-maleic anhydride copolymer (SMA) was used as a stabilizer in the process of graphite exfoliation to few-layer graphene using the technique of microfluidization in water. This method is simple, scalable, and cost-effective, and it produces graphene at concentrations as high as 0.522 mg mL−1. The generated high-quality graphene consists of few-layer sheets with a uniform size of less than 1 μm. The obtained graphene was uniformly dispersed and tightly integrated into a polyamide 66 (PA66) matrix to create high-performance multifunctional polymer nanocomposites. The tensile strength and thermal conductivity of 0.3 and 0.5 wt% EG/PA66 composites were found to be ~32.6% and ~28.8% greater than the corresponding values calculated for pure PA66, respectively. This confirms that the new protocol of liquid phase exfoliation of graphite has excellent potential for use in the industrial-scale production of high-quality graphene for numerous applications.

Highlights

Graphene is a novel two-dimensional carbon material that is of great interest because of its unprecedented properties, including high Young’s modulus (~1 TPa), great strength (130 GPa) [1], large specific surface area (~2630 m2 g−1) [2], and good thermal conductivity (5000 W m−1 K−1) [3]
Graphene may be prepared via chemical vapor deposition, epitaxial growth, mechanical exfoliation, or chemical oxidation [8,9,10,11], with the latter being the most common method used to produce the material on a large scale
Where A is the absorbance value at 660 nm, measured using UV-Vis spectroscopy, α is the absorption coefficient, C is the concentration of graphene, and l is the optical path length (l = 1 cm)

Summary

Introduction

Graphene is a novel two-dimensional carbon material that is of great interest because of its unprecedented properties, including high Young’s modulus (~1 TPa), great strength (130 GPa) [1], large specific surface area (~2630 m2 g−1) [2], and good thermal conductivity (5000 W m−1 K−1) [3]. Liquid phase exfoliation (LPE) of graphite powder to few-layer graphene has attracted the interest of many researchers [12,13,14] This novel technique was first proposed by Coleman et al for the production of graphene via sonication in solvents [15]. Microfluidization is considered as an effective method for the synthesis of few-layer graphene on a large scale, because of its low energy consumption and availability This homogenization technique is based on the use of high pressure to force a fluid through a narrow channel. It relies on three simultaneous effects (cavitation, collision, and high shear stress) to peel graphene material off from the bulk graphite [18]

Methods

Results

Conclusion