A semi-automated general statistical treatment of graphene systems

The production of graphene flakes at industrial scale required the development of new fabrication strategies beyond conventional mechanical exfoliation such as Liquid Phase Exfoliation. This successful endeavor should have been matched by a similar development in the statistical analysis of the newly mass-produced material. However, flake quantification protocols kept relying mostly on the analysis of a few flakes only, resulting in conflicting and misleading analyses. Here, we propose a new AFM-based semi-automated protocol for the simultaneous analysis and quantification of thousands of flakes. It yields statistically relevant values for flake size and thickness distributions. Moreover, we include an important mass content parameter which is essential to separate otherwise statistically identical graphene-rich from graphite-rich samples. This new methodology opens a new path in the characterization of large-scale produced flakes enabling direct and trustful comparison between different graphene, or any other 2D material, products.