Enhancing the Efficiency of Graphene Oxide Reduction in Low-Power Digital Video Disc Drives by a Simple Precursor Heat Treatment

Laser reduction of graphene oxide (GO) produces graphene effectively. As a low-power laser source, commercial digital video disc (DVD) drives provide a versatile platform to produce reduced graphene films in designed 2D patterns. However, research on how GO characteristics affect its laser reduction efficiency in DVD drives is rarely conducted. Here, we investigate how heating the GO dispersion affects the photoreduction process of GO films in a LightScribe DVD drive. Without noticeably changing the oxygen content, such mild heat treatment significantly improves GO’s absorption in the visible region, resulting in significant enhancement on GO’s laser reduction efficiency. We demonstrate that the laser reduction efficiency increases with the increasing treatment time. The enhanced reduction level greatly improves the performance of laser-scribed graphene electrodes in applications such as glucose sensors (with an optimal linear response range up to 2550 μM) and supercapacitors (with an optimal areal capacity of 1.37 mF cm–2 at the scan rate of 50 mV s–1). This proposed approach provides general insights into the production of laser-reduced graphene with low-power laser sources, for advanced device applications such as wearable electronics and flexible microelectronics.