Electrochemistry of graphene and related materials

Sustainable energy production, environmentally sustainable development, and affordable healthcare are three major challenges of the current global community. Electrochemistry is at the heart of many chemical and biological sensors, as well as energy storage and generation technologies. Electrochemistry utilizes energy in the cleanest possible form, as electricity, to collect or inject electrons through electrodes. Several synthetic routes have been established to prepare graphene, but each one of them, besides possessing different scalability, generates graphene with very different characteristics, which strongly influence its properties. The exfoliation of graphite was also achieved in aqueous solutions with the use of ultrasound in the presence of surfactants such as sodium dodecyl benzenesulfonate (SDBS), sodium cholate (SC), and 1-pyrenecarboxylic acid. The use of ultrasonication is necessary to facilitate the separation of graphene sheets but has a major drawback of breaking them into very small and inhomogeneous flakes.