Nanoarchitectonics with stacked CVD-grown graphene sheets for high-performance ultra-flexible transparent conductive films

Abstract

CVD-grown continuous graphene films are promising candidates as transparent electrodes. Although pristine graphene films have high breaking strength, they are still prone to ripping after tensile bending or stretching, which affects their electrical conductivity negatively. Here, we prepared nanoarchitectonics with stacked CVD-grown graphene sheets for transparent conductive films. While possessing ultra-flexibility, their conductivity and optical transparence have no gap between those of CVD-grown continuous graphene films with a sheet resistance of 108 Ω sq⁻¹ at 89.93 % transmittance. The electromechanical bendability and stretchability of stacked graphene sheets is larger than 30 % and up to 20 %, respectively. In contrast, the electromechanical bendability and stretchability of continuous graphene films is only 10 %. Our experiment results show that a large number of edges in graphene sheets would generate massive strain release, which causes much less crack density in each layer of graphene sheets. Therefore, the stacked graphene sheets have more stable electromechanical behavior.