How Does The Substance Will Play A Huge Role - 1591 Words

Ever since graphene has been found, scientists began to wonder how the substance will play a huge role in our future. Predicting which sector graphene can improve is easy. With the prior knowledge from previous experiments, the characteristics found could be used to formulate a list of industrial sectors where the specific characteristics would be useful. However, the experimentation for these hypotheses require countless amount of experimentation. In most cases, graphene would be mixed with several other useful materials to create a composite material. These added materials could make the composite material stronger, lighter, harder, etc. Unfortunately, these added materials may also bring in unfavorable changes. Furthermore, nobody†¦show more content†¦Graphene synthesis usually utilise a method called exfoliation, which is defined as taking the outermost layer of graphite. There are three major types of exfoliation: chemical, mechanical, and thermal. The paper mainly foc uses on chemical and mechanical exfoliation for graphene synthesis, which are the methods with highest number of experiments done. Chemical exfoliation by reduction. Scientists decided to continue the infamous experiment of Benjamin Brodie by reacting strong reducing agents to graphite. In 2015, Li and Chopra attempted to do the same principle by Brodie. They first convert graphite to a compound known as graphene oxide. This process made the thickness of the substance decrease significantly as the 3-D graphite layers are converted to 2-D layer of graphene oxide. Subsequently, they would reduce graphene oxide to a monolayer graphene. The process of reduction of graphene oxide was intended to remove the oxygen atoms from the molecule. Specifically, the reducing process are focused on groups of molecules from -COH (hydroxyl) or -COOH (carboxyl) (Li Chopra, 2015). By removing the oxygen from these groups of molecules, each carbon atom would be able to bond with 3 other carbon atoms in a hybridized sp2 bonds. This reduction method can be done by the help of a reducing agent, a substance which helps process of reduction to occur. Similar to most exper iments, this trial used strong acids as a reducing agent. However, the