Graphene fiber: a new material platform for unique applications

摘要

Graphene fiber (GF) is of practical importance because it integrates the remarkable properties of individual graphene sheets into useful, macroscopic ensembles that possess the common characteristics of fibers, such as mechanical flexibility for textiles, while maintaining the unique advantages over conventional carbon fibers, such as low cost, light weight, shapeability and ease of functionalization in an in situ or post-synthetic manner for various applications. In this review, we judiciously summarize the significant advances in GFs achieved by our group and others in recent years, including the tunable and controllable preparation of GFs with functionality and their remarkable applications for unconventional devices, such as flexible fiber-type actuators, robots, motors, photovoltaic cells and supercapacitors. In this review, the significant advances of the new type of graphene fibers (GFs) achieved during the recent few years have been systematically summarized, including the tunable and controllable preparation of GFs with functionalizations and their remarkable applications for unconventional devices such as flexible fiber-type of actuators, robots, motors, photovoltaic cells and supercapacitors. Graphene has set records for both its mechanical strength and electrical conductivity. Exploiting these properties for use in practical devices, however, requires techniques that transform this atom-thin substance into large-scale objects. Liangti Qu and colleagues from the Beijing Institute of Technology in China review an innovative approach to achieving this goal that uses ‘graphene fibers’ — long, thin and robust materials that can be synthesized by extruding liquid-crystal-like graphene oxide suspensions into filaments or through spontaneous reactions inside dimensionally confined glass pipelines. These stretchable fibers can be woven inside textiles for wearable electronics applications, combined with photovoltaic elements to make solar wires or used as shape-shifting actuators for robotic devices. The researchers caution, however, that more effort is needed to reduce defects inside graphene fibers that currently hinder their performance.