Fabrication and Characterization of Aero/Hydrogels Based on Reduced Graphene Oxide Grown by Hydrothermal Method

CAMILO ACUÑA; KHRIS CANCINO; MARTÍN ROBLE; DONOVAN DIAZ-DROGUETT; GUSTAVO M. MORALES

Termas de Chillán

Taller; TLMC2; 2016

Federación Latinoamericana de Materiales Carbonosos

Materials based in graphene and reduced graphene oxides have potential applications in capacitors, water flters, and gas sensors due to their good electric conductivity and large area per unit volume, and also, because of the possibility of modifcation of their surface chemical properties. Using a starting solution of graphene oxide and temperature is possible to grow 3-D porous macroscopic structures with certain mechanical strength via different physicochemical routes. One of these routes is the hydrothermal method, which allows controlling the size, the porous morphology, and the chemical properties of the grown structure varying, for example, the time and temperature of preparation. On the other hand, the fnal 3-D shape and size of the aero/hydrogel will depend on the container used in the hydrothermal synthesis. In this work, 3-D porous structures of reduced graphene oxide were grown through a simple hydrothermal method without the addition of reduction agents or later processing. The synthesis temperatures and times used were between 120o and 180° C and 1 and 15 hours, respectively. Furthermore, to determinate the infuence of synthesis parameters on the morphological and chemical properties of the structures obtained, characterization techniques such as scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive X-Ray spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy and IR spectroscopy were used. For other hand, the specifc surface area of these 3-d structures was determined using BET method to study the dependence of porous morphology with synthesis parameters.