The Effect of Carbon/Oxygen Ratio upon Structure-Property Relationships in Polymer/Graphene Nanocomposites

Abstract

The oxygen functional group limits the performance of graphene oxide (GO). By raising the Carbon/Oxygen (C/O) ratio, reducing the oxygen functional group may enhance thermal stability. The effects of the (C/O) ratio of graphene derivatives on the structure-properties relationship in metallocene linear low-density polyethylene (PE), homo polypropylene (PP), and blends thereof were investigated in this research. Using reduced graphene oxide (rGO) and pristine graphene (G), the oxygen functional groups were reduced. The effect of raising the C/O ratio of GO, rGO, and G blending with PE and PP synthesized by solution blending is discussed. Solvent processing was used to synthesise these nanocomposites, with dimethylformamide) DMF (and o-xylene served as the solvents for graphene flakes and polymers, respectively, before the two components were combined to form a well-mixed initial state. Wide-angle X-ray diffraction was used to investigate the crystallisation of the nanocomposites (WAXD). X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), ultraviolet visible spectroscopy (UVVS), and Raman spectroscopy were used to characterise the chemical structures, with the latter being used to calculate the intensity ratio of D and G band (ID/IG) value for pure graphene specimens. The C/O ratio was calculated as , 4.9 and 2.2 for the G, rGO and GO respectively. While the (ID/IG (increased with increasing the C/O ratio, the ID/IG values were calculated as 0.285, 1.137 and 1.726 for pure GO, rGO and G samples. Differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA) were used to determine the melting temperature ( ), crystallization temperature ( ) as well as a range of degradation temperatures.