Supporting Information
Scalable realization of conductive graphene films for high-efficiency
microwave antennas
T. T. Tung
a(Ϯ)
, S. J. Chen
b(Ϯ)
, C. Fumeaux
b(*)
and D. Losic
a(*)
(a) School of Chemical engineering, the University of Adelaide, Adelaide, 5005 North
Terrace, South Australia
(b) School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, the University of Adelaide, Adelaide,
5005 North Terrace, South Australia
(Ϯ)
T. T. Tung and S. J. Chen contributed equally
(*)
Corresponding to: Prof. Christophe Fumeaux and Prof. Dusan Losic
Experimental details
1. Materials and Chemicals
Graphite flakes from the Uley graphite mine (Australia) and expanded graphite were kindly supplied
by Valence Industries, South Australia. Potassium permanganate (KMnO
4
) was purchased from Sigma-
Aldrich, Australia. Sulphuric acid (H
2
SO
4
, 98%), phosphoric acid (H
3
PO
4
, 85% w/w), hydrogen peroxide
(H
2
O
2
, 30%), hydrochloric acid (HCl, 35%) were purchased from Chem-Supply, Australia. All chemicals
were used directly without further processing.
2. Exfoliation of graphene and preparation of graphene conductive films
Graphene was prepared by liquid phase exfoliation of expanded graphite (EG) in graphene oxide (GO)
aqueous suspension, in which GO was prepared by the modified Hummer’s method as reported
previously
1
. Briefly, for processing GO-mediated exfoliation of graphene from EG, 300 mg EG powders
and 300 mL water were added in a 500 mL capped-round bottom flask, pre-sonicated with bath
sonicator for 1 h, and then 100 mL GO suspension with concentration of 1mg/mL was added. The
mixture was subjected to sonicate with a UIP1000hd (Hielscher) with sonotrode (diameter of 22 mm)
at a power of 200 W, and amplitude of 80% for 10 h where the temperature was kept less than 40
°
C.
Subsequently, the as-prepared suspension was left to stand for 1 day for setting down the large
graphite particles, and the supernatant was extracted by centrifugation at 4200 rpm for 1 h, which led
to the graphene being separated from the complex and precipitated in the GO supernatant. The
graphene product was decanted, washed several times with water, and redispersed in water to make
Electronic Supplementary Material (ESI) for Journal of Materials Chemistry C.
This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2016