Avaliação da condutividade elétrica de uma amostra de óxido de grafeno reduzido visando seu potencial para aplicação em tintas condutoras

Abstract

Graphene, one of the allotropic forms of carbon, is a two-dimensional material with a wide range of properties and great potential for the most diverse applications. One of the most used synthesis methods is the chemical exfoliation (Tour method), known for ensuring the obtainment of a greater amount of graphene oxide (GO), contributing to solve one of the biggest problems in graphene synthesis, which is the difficulty to produce it on a large scale. GO synthesized via chemical exfoliation has insulating properties, however, it was proven that the electrical conductivity can be recovered if the functional groups are eliminated from its structure through thermal reduction of GO in order to obtain reduced graphene oxide (rGO). The rGO brings with it the recovery of the damaged properties due to the chemical exfoliation process, thus, this may present great potential for applications involving electrical conductivity. Currently, the range of applications for conductive inks has been growing, with its main purpose being the insertion of a conductive material, guaranteeing the necessary conductivity for such an application. With this in mind, the present work had as its main objective the synthesis of GO using the method of chemical exfoliation and the production of rGO through the thermal reduction of the synthesized GO, in order to evaluate not only the quality of the materials obtained, but also their capacity as possible conducting agents. The results obtained through Raman spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction (XRD) confirmed that the synthesis and reduction of the material occurred satisfactorily. According to the SEM analysis, the surface of the sample becomes corrugated due to the escape of functional groups during the reduction process and, from the visualization of the cross section, the presence of the individual sheets of graphene is evident. In contrast, the Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) technique showed that the reduction performed was not as effective as expected.