- In this study we have systematically tested the efficacy of a new deposition procedure for graphene-related 2D materials (GR2M’s) from liquid suspension onto a substrate for quantitative analysis of their size and shape distribution with electron microscopy.
The technique is an extension of the conventional drop-casting method, and we have designated it “wire-print” deposition. It consists of two steps, first one being usual drop-casting on a copper substrate and second one involving a thin copper wire with a sub-mm diameter being dipped into the deposited droplet and retracted with a corresponding half-spherical droplet attached on its tip and final deposition of this entire nL-amount of suspension onto e.g. a silicon wafer for microscopical, detailed analysis. 11 series of such a wire-print deposition for a graphene-based ink have been considered, whereby various conditions (treatment of the starting suspension) have been experimented with a repetition of up to 10 times perIn this study we have systematically tested the efficacy of a new deposition procedure for graphene-related 2D materials (GR2M’s) from liquid suspension onto a substrate for quantitative analysis of their size and shape distribution with electron microscopy.
The technique is an extension of the conventional drop-casting method, and we have designated it “wire-print” deposition. It consists of two steps, first one being usual drop-casting on a copper substrate and second one involving a thin copper wire with a sub-mm diameter being dipped into the deposited droplet and retracted with a corresponding half-spherical droplet attached on its tip and final deposition of this entire nL-amount of suspension onto e.g. a silicon wafer for microscopical, detailed analysis. 11 series of such a wire-print deposition for a graphene-based ink have been considered, whereby various conditions (treatment of the starting suspension) have been experimented with a repetition of up to 10 times per condition, all together 86 spots on a silicon wafer of 10 mm x 10 mm. The evaluation of one series of 8 repeated wire-print depositions reveal that the deposited spots are visualized with SEM. The weak presence of coffee-rings, irregular spot shape, and presence of agglomerates should be noticed. Both the mean value of the 8 ECD distributions and the total number of flakes deposited in each spot show a variance in the range of 17% and 22%, respectively. In the context of accurate analysis of such challenging complex materials these numbers can be considered as excellent and demonstrate the high benefit of the wire-print deposition for accurate morphological measurements on GR2M’s.…

