Rapid thermal decomposition of confined graphene oxide films in air

Abstract The ability to scale up the production of chemically modified forms of graphene has led to intense interest in the manufacture and commercialization of graphene-based materials. Free-standing film-like materials comprised of stacked and overlapped platelets of graphene oxide (G-O) or thermally and electrically conductive reduced graphene oxide (rG-O) are potentially useful in various applications including filtration membranes, mechanical seals, protective layers, heating elements and components of batteries or supercapacitors as well as in electronics and optoelectronics. The advances in these applications require efficient and low-cost protocols for fabricating certain types of layered materials and, as such, protocols are urgently needed for the reduced forms of G-O. Here we report an efficient and straightforward method to thermally reduce thin films of stacked G-O platelets while still maintaining their structural integrity. By rapidly heating confined G-O films on a hot plate set to 400 °C under an atmosphere of air, G-O films were readily converted to intact, electrically conductive, reduced thin films. The structure and degree of reduction of the resulting free-standing rG-O films were found to be comparable to those obtained by slow annealing at the same temperature.