Since its discovery, graphene has captured the attention of scientists and engineers for its many extraordinary properties. But graphene oxide—an oxidized derivative of graphene—largely has been viewed as graphene’s inferior cousin.
“Graphene is so perfect,” said Northwestern Engineering’s Jiaxing Huang. “And graphene oxide is more defective, so it’s like the weaker, less exciting version of graphene.”
Now a Northwestern Univ. team has found that graphene oxide’s seemingly undesirable defects surprisingly give rise to exciting mechanical properties. Led by Horacio Espinosa, the James N. and Nancy J. Farley Professor in Manufacturing and Entrepreneurship at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, the researchers used a unique experimentation and modeling approach to become the first to examine the mechanics of this previously ignored material at the atomic level. What they discovered could potentially unlock the secret to successfully scaling up graphene oxide, an area that has been limited because its building blocks have not been well understood.
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