Mechanical Robustness of Graphene on Flexible Transparent Substrates

Abstract

This study reports on a facile and widely applicable method of transferring chemical vapor deposited (CVD) graphene uniformly onto optically transparent and mechanically flexible substrates using commercially available, low-cost ultraviolet adhesive (UVA) and hot-press lamination (HPL). We report on the adhesion potential between the graphene and the substrate, and we compare these findings with those of the more commonly used cast polymer handler transfer processes. Graphene transferred with the two proposed methods showed lower surface energy and displayed a higher degree of adhesion (UVA: 4.40 ± 1.09 N/m, HPL: 0.60 ± 0.26 N/m) compared to equivalent CVD-graphene transferred using conventional poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA: 0.44 ± 0.06 N/m). The mechanical robustness of the transferred graphene was investigated by measuring the differential resistance as a function of bend angle and repeated bend-relax cycles across a range of bend radii. At a bend angle of 100° and a 2.5 mm bend radius, for both transfer techniques, the normalized resistance of graphene transferred on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) was around 80 times less than that of indium-tin oxide on PET. After 10(4) bend cycles, the resistance of the transferred graphene on PET using UVA and HPL was found to be, on average, around 25.5 and 8.1% higher than that of PMMA-transferred graphene, indicating that UVA- and HPL-transferred graphene are more strongly adhered compared to PMMA-transferred graphene. The robustness, in terms of maintained electrical performance upon mechanical fatigue, of the transferred graphene was around 60 times improved over ITO/PET upon many thousands of repeated bending stress cycles. On the basis of present production methods, the development of the next-generation of highly conformal, diverse form factor electronics, exploiting the emerging family of two-dimensional materials, necessitates the development of simple, low-cost, and mechanically robust transfer processes; the developed UVA and HPL approaches show significant potential and allow for large-area-compatible, near-room temperature transfer of graphene onto a diverse range of polymeric supports.

Common surface structures of graphene and Au(111): The effect of rotational angle on adsorption and electronic properties

“…Graphene monolayers with long-range order can be synthesized on metal surfaces via, for example, chemical vapor deposition (CVD). [15] Graphene coating on metal surfaces is an advantageous method which can be adapted to a wide range of areas such as electronics, solar * Corresponding author : emete@balikesir.edu.tr cells, optoelectronics, sensor-technology and bio-devices. [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] The growth of graphene monolayers on metal foils such as Cu leads to polycrystalline films with domains depending on the crystallographic orientations.…”

Review of fabrication methods of large-area transparent graphene electrodes for industry

“…Unfortunately, it is a very mechanical process and does not have a high throughput nor is it compatible with large-area processing. Also, while this method can be used for transferring graphene on arbitrary substrates, it is difficult to achieve a conformal transfer on non-rigid substrates [117].…”

“…Hot press lamination is a method, where the graphene is transferred directly from the growth substrate to the final substrate utilizing an adhesive layer that is melted and solidified by various means [103,106,117,[121][122][123]. A similar method in comparison to the stamping method, but it usually utilizes higher temperatures and requires a separate machine for the transfer process.…”

Graphene Foam Chemical Sensor System Based on Principal Component Analysis and Backpropagation Neural Network

“…Graphene was a kind of two-dimensional material which has been extensively investigated due to its outstanding performance in terms of high surface-to-volume ratio and outstanding electrical, optical, and mechanical properties [1][2][3][4]. A number of reports were focused on chemical sensing systems based on graphene materials such as chemiresistors [5,6], field-effect transistors [7,8], and other chemical sensors [9,10].…”