ABSTRACT
A strategy has been developed to obtain ultralight chemically converted graphene aerogels with high compressibility. For practical applications, small graphene nanosheets usually need to be constructed or assembled into macroscopic materials. Leavening has been demonstrated to be an effective approach to transfer compact graphene structures into porous ones, by finding a proper leavening procedure. Template-guided methods are also effective in developing three-dimensional graphene architectures. The graphene layers contained a large amount of ripples and wrinkles, due to the difference in the thermal expansion coefficients between the nickel and graphene. To prevent the graphene network from collapsing during the etching of the nickel skeleton, a thin layer of poly(methyl methacrylate) was deposited on top of the graphene films as a support. The graphene-based structures were mechanically strong while maintaining high flexibility. Graphene-based materials in general have been employed to fabricate various sensing devices, because graphene nanosheets have a huge specific surface area and unique optoelectronic properties.
