Fabrication of Various Conducting Polymers Using Graphene Oxide as a Chemical Oxidant

Recently, using graphene oxide (GO) for “carbocatalysis” has been very attractive as a novel application of graphene-based nanomaterials and is expected to open a host of possibilities for chemical synthesis because of the abundance of natural carbon sources, as well as the low density, extensive chemical functionalization, hydrophilicity, low cost, and ease of preparation. Here, we demonstrate that the GO can play a role as a chemical oxidant for various CPs (polythiophene, polyaniline, and polypyrrole), and diverse graphene–CP composites (graphene–polythiophene, graphene–polyaniline, and graphene–polypyrrole) can simply and rapidly be synthesized by using the GO as both graphene precursor and chemical oxidant. The UV–vis analysis confirms that the GO has successfully polymerized the CPs and been transformed to reduced graphene oxide (RGO). The SEM and TEM analyses show that the CPs have successfully been coated on the few-layered graphene sheets. Raman analysis and series of FT-IR analyses have been conducted to survey what functional group in the GO polymerized the monomers, and they reveal that hydroxyl and epoxy groups in the GO polymerized the monomers. Finally, plausible polymerization mechanisms have specifically and deeply proposed based on the IR result, classical radical polymerization mechanisms of the CPs, and widely adopted thermal reduction mechanism of the GO.