This special Physics department colloquium is scheduled for Friday 11/11/16 at 9:00 AM in the Kenwood Interdisciplinary Research Complex (KIRC) Room KEN 2035. Anyone is welcome.

Reduction of Graphene Oxide & Soluble Molybdenum Oxide Mixture in High Vacuum for Production of Materials for Energy Storage Device
Binod Manandhar, PhD Candidate/UWM Dept. of Physics

Graphene, a two dimensional honey comb structure of carbon due to its high electrical and thermal conductivity, and high specific surface area, is an excellent candidate for nano-electronics and energy storage. However, it is very difficult and expensive to produce a single layered graphene by the traditional method of mechanical exfoliation of highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG). It is mainly manufactured by chemical vapour deposition (CVD) or more economically by chemical exfoliation of graphite by Hummer’s modified method. But there is a major disadvantage in using the chemical exfoliation, instead of forming a single layer of pure graphene, a non-stoichiometric and insulating graphene oxide (GO) is formed. GO further needs to be reduced into graphene by either chemical or thermal method.

In our work, we have demonstrated the thermal reduction of GO in vacuum chamber (10-6 torr) in presence of soluble oxide of Molybdenum, named as Molybdenum blue (Mo blue), at low temperature (550-650 °C). During thermal reduction, we were able to produce nanocomposite of MoO2 and reduced GO. Due to its distorted rutile structure MoO2 has metal like conductivity. It has high specific charge capacity. The nano composite was highly electrostatic, has very high surface to volume ratio, so it has great potential for making anode for lithium ion batteries (LIBs).