Triggering a Self-Sustaining Reduction of Graphenes Oxide for High-Performance Energy Storage Devices

Various graphene oxide (GO) reductions, especially thermal routes, are often performed, which not only require a huge energy input from external heating sources, but also release abundant energy causing potential environmental and safety hazards. This becomes a serious bottleneck for large-scale reduced GO (RGO) production in industry applications. Here, we demonstrate an energy efficient self-sustaining GO reduction process, which can be initiated by a minor heat trigger. The energy released from the initial deoxygenation is fed to the neighboring sites for subsequent deoxygenation. Such a continuous energy feeding process eventually reduces the entire GO film without any external energy input. A large-scale uniformly reduced GO film can thus be produced in an energy efficient way. The high quality of the self-sustaining RGO is demonstrated by its high specific capacitance of 174.6 F g–1 and a device energy density of 63 Wh kg–1 when it is used as a supercapacitor electrode.