Using Electrochemically Exfoliated Graphene As a Conductive Layer of a Printed Circuit Board

Abstract

Graphene is a popular material because of its unique two-dimensional (2D) structure and intrigued physical and chemical properties. Graphene obtained from chemical exfoliation is usually prepared by oxidizing graphite in a mixing solution containing strong acids and oxidants, which severely destroys the honeycomb lattices of graphene and deteriorates its performance even though these defects could be recovered partly by subsequent reduction process.[1, 2] Recently, electrochemical exfoliation of graphite has attracted attention due to its easy, fast and environmentally friendly nature to produce high quality graphene.[3] In this study, one step electrochemical process not only can synthesize exfoliated graphene oxide (GO) but also can dop in the GO with heteroatoms. After grafting the exfoliated GO on a printed circuit board (PCB), the subsequent reduction of GO sheets to graphene recovers the graphitic structure as a conductive layer. We discussed the effect of electrochemically exfoliated GO on copper electroplating on a PCB. The operating parameters which influence the electron transfer on the electrochemically exfoliated GO, such as electrolytes, operating currents and graphite source, were investigated by using several analysis methods, such as atomic force microscopy (AFM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and Raman spectroscopy techniques. Keywords: Electrochemical exfoliation, Graphene oxide, Conductive layer, Printed Circuit Board Reference: [1] S. Park, and R. S. Ruoff, “Chemical methods for the production of graphenes,” Nature nanotechnology, vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 217, 2009. [2] X. Li, H. Wang, J. T. Robinson, H. Sanchez, G. Diankov, and H. Dai, “Simultaneous nitrogen doping and reduction of graphene oxide,” Journal of the American Chemical Society, vol. 131, no. 43, pp. 15939-15944, 2009. [3] K. Parvez, R. Li, S. R. Puniredd, Y. Hernandez, F. Hinkel, S. Wang, X. Feng, and K. Müllen, “Electrochemically exfoliated graphene as solution-processable, highly conductive electrodes for organic electronics,” ACS nano, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 3598-3606, 2013.