Delocalized Electrochemical Exfoliation toward High-throughput Fabrication of High-quality Graphene.pdf

Abstract: " Graphene has well demonstrated its unique properties and advantageous performances in lots of fields during the last 16 years. However, its industrial applications are still impeded by inefficient mass fabrication of high-quality graphene because of the great challenge in deep yet non-destructive graphite exfoliation. Herein, we demonstrated a delocalized electrochemical exfoliation (DEE) technique to efficiently fabricate high-quality graphene. Importantly, chemically transmitting the electric potentials was firstly proposed to spatially extend the exfoliation capability of electric potentials and electrochemically exfoliate every graphite particle dispersed in the electrolyte. The resulting graphene possesses ultralow defect density (ID/IG~0.07) and extremely high carbon-to-oxygen ratio (~28). Remarkably, high yields (~98.4%, 1-10 layers) and record high production rates (~72.7 g h−1) are realized in up-scaled batch of DEE. Further mechanism investigation revealed that the exfoliation capability of the electric potentials was transmitted to the whole electrolyte system by a dynamically favorable pathway. This pathway includes electrochemical oxidation, intercalation and interlayer bubble generation reactions, which makes deep and non-destructive exfoliation possible for every dispersed graphite particle in a scalable and reproducible manner. This way of using electric potentials differs from existing electrochemical methods and guarantees high throughput as well as high quality. The strategy of delocalized electrochemical exfoliation and the underlying concept of chemically transmitting the electric potentials would accelerate the commercialization of graphene and inspire more efficient fabrication of two-dimensional materials.