Controlled assembly and reduction of graphene oxide networks for conductive composites

Abstract

Graphene has attracted enormous interest in the scientific community as the first 2D material with exceptional mechanical, electronic and thermal properties. Pristine Graphene is notoriously difficult to process for macroscale applications, to overcome this many people use graphene oxide (GO) instead. GO is water soluble and easily functionalised and so can be simply processed into various systems. GO lacks the exceptional electronic properties of graphene due to structural disorder, therefore an important area of research is on the reduction of GO, which partly restores the structure and properties of graphene. Various techniques have been developed to perform the reduction step. We report a simple approach for preparing conductive Polymer Latex-rGO composites by using a latex-assembly method. After a treatment in the oven at low T, we can reduce the GO in situ. We make use of the inherent GO properties to optimise the aqueous composite fabrication, which is scalable and adaptable, and then restore conductivity with a simple, low temperature, heating step; opening up pathways to tunable electronic composite materials on a large scale.