Graphene, a new class of two-dimensional carbon nanostructure, has been highlighted, owing to its excellent electronic transport properties, extremely high mechanical stiffness electrical conductivity, and high aspect ratio.. Up to now, many approaches have been developed to prepare graphene materials, including micromechanical cleavage, chemical vapor deposition, and chemical conversion.

　  Targeting for the large-scale, low-cost fabrication of grapheme and its practical applications, we have prepared macroscopic graphene films by combining chemical conversion in liquid-phase with a simple and low-cost electrophoretic deposition (EPD) technique. Moreover, we have successfully developed an electrochemical deposition (ECD) technique to prepare amorphous carbon films. Similar to the EPD technique, the ECD technique has many advantages, such as availability for large area deposition, low-deposition temperature, low-consumption of energy and simplicity in setting up.

　  In this paper, we first reported a low-cost technique using simultaneous electrodeposition to fabricate a-CNPs/GNS composite film. The result showed that with the technique the dense and electrically conductive a-CNPs/GNS composite film with good adhesion to the substrate can be prepared. Thus, we believe that such a-CNP/GNS composite film is a potential low-cost candidate for various applications, such as electrodes, capacitors, batteries and field emitters. The article is published in CARBON 2010 (48 ) 2644-2673.

Top-view FE-SEM images of the GNS film (a, b) and the a-CNP/GNS composite film (d, e). Side-view FE-SEM images of the GNS film (c) and the CNP/GNS composite film (f)

TEM image and SAED pattern of the GNS film (a, b). TEM image and SAED pattern of the a-CNP/GNS composite film (c, d).