Journal of Nanomedicine & Nanotechnology

Synthesis of graphene by thermal exfoliation of natural cellulosic material

4^th International Conference on Nanotek & Expo

December 01-03, 2014 DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel San Francisco Airport, USA

Harmeet Kaur, Rajwinder Kaur, Jaspreet Kaur Bajwa, Princejot Gill, Vikram Sharma, Shyamasree Gupta Chatterjee, Somenath Chatterjee and Ajoy Kumar Ray

Accepted Abstracts: J Nanomed Nanotechnol

Abstract:

Graphene is a single-atom thick, two-dimensional sheet of carbon which has exceptional characteristics in chemical, electrical, material, and optical properties. There are different methods for preparation of graphene from graphite material which includes peeling of layers of graphite by micro-mechanical exfoliation method, thermal exfoliation, and chemical reduction of graphite oxide (GO), CVD method etc. All methods have some limitations like low production yield, cost, and impurity. These can be overcome by the present synthesis technique. Our method for synthesis of graphene and nickel (Ni) decorated graphene (graphene-Ni) from flower petals by thermal exfoliation. Flower petals are used as the source of carbon because of the carbon-carbon bonds present in cellulose and hemi-cellulose, undergo cleavage and molecular rearrangement at high temperature under anaerobic condition that eventually leads to the formation of graphene. Incorporation of Ni helps better exfoliation to produce the high quality graphene. Chemically treated flower petals are subjected to heat treatment above 800?C for 30 minutes in argon atmosphere. It is simple, eco-friendly; cost effective, and can be functionalised by various metals and easily produced in larger scale. Characterisation of synthesized graphene is done by Scanning Tunnelling Microscope (STM), Fourier Transformation Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR). Sample prepared at 1000?C has small amount of oxygen as revealed by FTIR results. A STM result shows the formation of graphene layers.

Biography :

Harmeet Kaur is pursuing her under-graduate studies in Nanotechnology at Sri Guru Granth Sahib World University, Punjab, India.