(197a) Production of Three-Dimensional Porous Graphene for Sodium-Ion Batteries

Graphene is a 2D atomic-scale hexagonal lattice of carbon atoms that is gaining much interest in the scientific community for use in semiconductors, microelectronics, energy storage, and touchscreens. This is due to its excellent high electrical conductivity, mechanical strength, and surface area. Graphene is also manipulatable, through chemical and physical means, resulting in the production of porous graphene, which can exhibit different properties with controllable manners. It is because of these excellent chemical and mechanical properties that we have focused on the preparation and testing of nanoporous graphene as an anode in sodium ion batteries. The preference of using sodium ions instead of lithium ions is attributed to the abundance and low cost of the sodium ions. Our lab successfully created multiple nanoporous graphene films under humid airflow, using the “Breath Figure Method”. The produced films had tunable pore sizes. The physical properties of the product such as pore size were measured, and correlated with its electrochemical performance.