Non-Aqueous Approach to Synthesize Amorphous/Crystalline Metal Oxide-Graphene Nanosheet Hybrid Composites

Presently, there is a dramatically increasing interest in developing graphene-supported nanocomposites, due to their unprecedented properties. Apart from the methods exposed in previous studies, this work presents a nonaqueous approach of using atomic layer deposition (ALD) to constitute novel metal oxide-graphene hybrid nanocomposites based on graphene nanosheet (GNS) powders. It is demonstrated that this gas-solid strategy exhibits many unique benefits. It reports for the first time that the as-prepared SnO2-GNS nanocomposites are featured with not only tunable morphologies but controllable amorphous and crystalline phases of SnO2 component as well, using SnCl4 and H2O as the ALD precursors. Furthermore, the determinant factors and underlying mechanisms were outlined and discussed in this work. As a consequence, besides the demonstration of ALD as an important approach for nanoarchitecturing novel metal oxide-GNS composites, the as-synthesized SnO2-GNS hybrid nanocomposites provide more choices for many important applications, such as lithium-ion batteries, solar cells, and gas sensing.