Plasma-Electric Field Controlled Growth of Oriented Graphene for Energy Storage Applications

TL;DR

This study investigates how in-built plasma electric fields influence the growth orientation, morphology, and properties of graphene, enabling controlled production of various structured graphene sheets for energy storage applications.

Contribution

It reveals the dependence of graphene growth orientation and morphology on electric field direction, enabling tailored graphene structures for enhanced energy storage devices.

Findings

Tilting substrates changes graphene morphology from flat to oriented sheets.

Electric field orientation affects defect types and wetting properties.

Growth orientation transition impacts charge storage capacity.

Abstract

Graphene is well known to grow as flat sheets aligned with the growth substrate. Oriented graphene structures typically normal to the substrate have recently gained major attention. Most often, normal orientation is achieved in plasma-assisted growth and is believed to be due to plasma induced in-built electric field, which is usually oriented normal to the substrate. This work focuses on the effect of in-built electric field on growth direction, morphology, interconnectedness, and physical properties of various configurations of graphene structures and reveals the unique dependence of these features on electric field orientation. It is shown that tilting of growth substrates from parallel to normal direction with respect to the direction of inbuilt plasma electric field leads to the morphological transitions from flat graphene structure, to oriented individual graphene sheets and then interconnected three-dimensional networks of oriented graphene sheets. The revealed transition of the growth orientation leads to change in wetting nature, types of defect in graphitic structures as well as affects their charge storage capacity when used as supercapacitor electrodes. This simple and versatile approach opens new opportunities for the production of potentially large batches of differently oriented and structured graphene sheets in one production run.