Reducing Sugar: New Functional Molecules for the Green Synthesis of Graphene Nanosheets

TLDR

A green, facile route is presented for converting exfoliated graphite oxide into graphene nanosheets using reducing sugars such as glucose, fructose, and sucrose. The sugars reduce the graphite oxide to graphene nanosheets, which are then characterized by atomic force microscopy, UV–visible absorption spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and X‑ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The resulting graphene nanosheets are environmentally benign, water‑stable due to sugar‑derived capping agents, scalable for large‑scale production, and exhibit promising electrocatalytic activity toward catecholamines.

Abstract

In this paper, we developed a green and facile approach to the synthesis of chemically converted graphene nanosheets (GNS) based on reducing sugars, such as glucose, fructose and sucrose using exfoliated graphite oxide (GO) as precursor. The obtained GNS is characterized with atomic force microscopy, UV−visible absorption spectroscopy, transmission electron microscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and so on. The merit of this method is that both the reducing agents themselves and the oxidized products are environmentally friendly. It should be noted that, besides the mild reduction capability to GO, the oxidized products of reducing sugars could also play an important role as a capping reagent in stabilizing as-prepared GNS simultaneously, which exhibited good stability in water. This approach can open up the new possibility for preparing GNS in large-scale production alternatively. Moreover, it is found that GNS-based materials could be of great value for applications in various fields, such as good electrocatalytic activity toward catecholamines (dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine).