Templated Growth of Multilayer Graphene from Cellulose for the Fabrication of Photovoltaic Devices

Graphene is one of the fast emerging materials in the field of material chemistry. Graphene possesses exceptionally great flexibility, extremely high electrical and thermal conductivity which makes it stand out for numerous applications in materials chemistry. The growing demand to produce high quality graphene inexpensively in larger scale remains a challenge for researchers. Our work emphasizes a straightforward and simple method of high-quality graphene synthesis on substrates with area of many cm². The multilayer graphene was grown utilizing renewable material (cellulose) as a source of carbon. In our first venture cellulose paper was used as a carbon source soaked in iron catalyst.  We achieved high-quality multilayered graphene sheets of ~6.8 cm² area.  In the present talk, I will demonstrate graphene based photovoltaic device (figure 1) with photo-to-electron conversion efficiency ranging from 0.5-2 %. SEM images of nanotubes gave average diameter of the nanotubes to be 200 nm and average nanotubes thickness of 3-10 nm. Graphene films and nanotubes (figure 1 a and b) were characterized using infrared (IR), Raman, X-ray diffraction (XRD), energy-dispersive X-ray (EDS)) spectroscopy; scanning electron (SEM), and transmission electron (TEM) microscopy.  The devices are characterized using AFM, Solar-simulator (AM 1.5), and I-V curves.