Nacre-mimic Layered Materials Based On Polymer Grafted Graphene Oxide

Recently, graphene oxide(GO) based 2D materials has exhibited outstanding mechanical properties, making it one of the best candidates for fabricating the high performance free-standing mimic nacre “brick-and-motar” hierarchical microstructural materials. In this paper, a “bottom up” strategy was introduced to prepare artificial nacre materials by using the polymer grafted GO as building blocks that can simultaneously avoiding local phase separation and introducing strong interfacial interaction. Here, we introduce three kinds of macromolecular with different glass transition temperature(Tg) into GO sheet constructing various free-standing papers and focus on their mechanical properties. The details are as follows:1. We obtained polystyrene(PS) grafted GO nanocomposites as building block through an in-situ polymerization using Ce(IV)/HNO3 redox system as initiator and assembled into GO-PS free-standing films with vacuum assistance. Meanwhile, by changing the concentration of initiator controlled PS contents of different GO-PS free-staning films were obtained.2. Fabricating a serious of GO-PBA(poly(n-butyl acrylate)) free-standing papers via the same method. Controlling the additional amounts of n-butyl acrylate monomers GO-PBA membranes with different PBA contents were obtained. Mimic nacre-liked film with high strength and elastomer with GO homogenously dispersed in PBA matrix can be obtained by varying the amount of monomer.3. Similarly, GO-PEA(poly(ethyl acrylate)) hybrid free-standing films were produced and the polymer contents were adjusted by tuning the monomer addition. Intrestingly, ethyl acrylate is favorable to graft on GO sheet rather than chain propagation when PEA chain approach to same extent so as to increase the grafting density. Consequently, the interlayer space of the building blocks is invariable in nanoscale.