Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 339

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 29 of the 29 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Graphene in Macroscopic Order: Liquid Crystals and Wet-Spun Fibers

Xu, Zhen, Gao, Chao·2014·Accounts of Chemical Research
DOI 10.1021/ar4002813
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

In nanotechnology, the creation of new nanoparticles consistently feeds back into efforts to design and fabricate new macroscopic materials with specific properties. As a two-dimensional (2D) building block of new materials, graphene has received widespread attention due to its exceptional mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties. But harnessing these attributes into new materials requires developing methods to assemble single-atom-thick carbon flakes into macroscopically ordered structures. Because the melt processing of carbon materials is impossible, fluid assembly is the only viable approach for meeting this challenge. But in the meantime, researchers need to solve two fundamental problems: creating orientational ordering in fluids and the subsequent phase-transformation from ordered fluids into ordered solid materials. To address these problems, this Account highlights our graphene chemistry methods that take advantage of liquid crystals to produce graphene fibers. We have successfully synthesized graphene oxide (GO) from graphite in a scalable manner. Using the size of graphite particles and post fractionation, we successfully tuned the lateral size of GO from submicron sizes to dozens of microns. Based on the rich chemistry of GO, we developed reliable methods for chemical or physical functionalization of graphene and produced a series of functionalized, highly soluble graphene derivatives that behave as single layers even at high concentrations. In the dispersive system of GO and functionalized graphenes, rich liquid crystals (LCs) formed spontaneously. Some of these liquid crystals had a conventional nematic phase with orientational order; others had a lamellar phase. Importantly, we observed a new chiral mesophase featuring a helical-lamellar structural model with frustrated disinclinations. The graphene-based LCs show ordered assembly behaviors in the fluid state of 2D colloids and lay a foundation for the design of ordered materials with optimal performances. Using the wet-spinning assembly approach, we transformed prealigned liquid crystalline dopes into graphene fibers (GFs) with highly ordered structures. We extended the wet-spinning assembly strategy to polymer-grafted or mixed graphene LCs to obtain hierarchically assembled, continuous nacre-mimetic fibers and hybridized graphene fibers. Both the neat GFs and the composite fibers are strong, flexible, electrically conductive, and chemically resistive. Multifunctional fibers that are both flexible and modular could be a key for applying atomically thin graphene in real-world materials and devices such as supercapacitors and solar cells. Therefore, we have opened a brand-new avenue for transforming mineral graphite into high performance, multifunctional GFs and offered an alternative strategy for the fabrication of carbon fibers. We hope that this Account and further efforts in the field will guide researchers toward the macroscopic assembly of graphene and its real-world applications.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1021/ar4002813

Cites

29 of 29 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Cited by

See all 339

Metadata

Authors
Xu, Z., & Gao, C.
Venue
Accounts of Chemical Research
Publisher
American Chemical Society (ACS)
Published
2014-02-20
Volume
47
Issue
4
Pages
1267-1276
ISSN
  • 0001-4842 (ISSN-L)
  • 1520-4898
DOI
10.1021/ar4002813
OpenAlex
W2328088474
Cited by
339
References
29
FWCI
19.36
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.