Conducting Graphene Synthesis from Electronic Waste
Anurag Bajpai, Partha Kumbhakar, Chandra Sekhar Tiwary, Krishanu Biswas
Abstract
“Waste-to-wealth” is always a subject of significant interest due to several aspects, including effective utilization of a large amount of e-waste by recycling valuable materials and thereby protecting the environment from pollution. Here, we have demonstrated a green, easily scalable, and sustainable method of synthesizing graphene from one of the major components of e-waste, that is, the polymeric component, using pulsed laser ablation. The proposed synthesis route showed great promise in synthesizing high-quality graphene. XPS shows that the sp2 hybrid state is the predominant chemical state of carbon in graphene. TEM and AFM investigations highlight that graphene has ≤4 layers with a high degree of crystallinity. The relationship between the graphene structure and laser parameters is established using Raman spectroscopy. Systematic modeling provides the optimum laser parameters (laser fluence of 20 J/cm2 with an ablation time of 600 s) for good-quality graphene and the maximum obtained yield of 40.2%. The high-quality synthesized graphene has further been utilized for highly conductive electronics contacts, useful for future robust electronics applications.