Nanoclay assisted electrochemical exfoliation of pencil core to high conductive graphene thin-film electrode

Kunfeng Chen; Dongfeng Xue; Sridhar Komarneni

doi:10.1016/j.jcis.2016.10.028

Nanoclay assisted electrochemical exfoliation of pencil core to high conductive graphene thin-film electrode

J Colloid Interface Sci. 2017 Feb 1:487:156-161. doi: 10.1016/j.jcis.2016.10.028. Epub 2016 Oct 15.

Authors

Kunfeng Chen¹, Dongfeng Xue², Sridhar Komarneni³

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Rare Earth Resource Utilization, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130022, China.
² State Key Laboratory of Rare Earth Resource Utilization, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130022, China. Electronic address: dongfeng@ciac.ac.cn.
³ Materials Research Institute, Materials Research Laboratory, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, United States. Electronic address: komarneni@psu.edu.

PMID: 27768999
DOI: 10.1016/j.jcis.2016.10.028

Abstract

Nanoclay assisted electrochemical exfoliation was developed to in-situ form functionalized graphene electrode materials from pencil core with different ratios of graphite and clay. This method made a positive transformation from solid graphite to graphene colloidal solution, which can be used to construct binder- and additive-free thin-film electrodes. Exfoliated graphene can be served as both conductive current collector (film resistance of 33Ω/square) and electrode materials. Graphene thin-film electrodes from pencil cores displayed higher capacity of 224 than 80mAh/g of that from pure graphite. The electrochemical performance can be controlled by the ratio of graphite and clay and the oxidation reaction of surface oxygen functional groups. The described nanoclay-assisted electrochemical oxidation route shows great potential for the synthesis of functionalized graphene electrode materials for high-conductive thin-film lithium ion batteries and supercapacitors.

Keywords: Electrochemical exfoliation; Electrode materials; Energy storage; Graphene colloid; High conductive; Pencil.