• Composites Research
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• v.29 no.6
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• pp.375-378
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• 2016

Characteristics of nanocrystalline materials are known substantially dependent on the microstructure such as grain size, crystal orientation, and grain boundary. Thus it is desired to have systematic characterization methods on the various nanomaterials with complex geometries, especially in low dimensional nature. One of the interested nanomaterials would be a pure two-dimensional material, graphene, with superior mechanical, thermal, and electrical properties. In this study, mechanical properties of "polycrystalline" graphene were numerically investigated by molecular dynamics simulations. Subdomains with various sizes would be generated in the polycrystalline graphene during the fabrication such as chemical vapor deposition process. The atomic models of polycrystalline graphene were generated using Voronoi tessellation method. Stress strain curves for tensile deformation were obtained for various grain sizes (5~40 nm) and their mechanical properties were determined. It was found that, as the grain size increases, Young's modulus increases showing the reverse Hall-Petch effect. However, the fracture strain decreases in the same region, while the ultimate tensile strength (UTS) rather shows slight increasing behavior. We found that the polycrystalline graphene shows the reverse Hall-Petch effect over the simulated domain of grain size (< 40 nm).

• Journal of the Korean Ceramic Society
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• v.54 no.6
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• pp.506-510
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• 2017

One of the characteristics of polycrystalline graphene that determines its material properties is grain size. Mechanical properties such as Young's modulus, yield strain and tensile strength depend on the grain size and show a reverse Hall-Petch effect at small grain size limit for some properties under certain conditions. While there is agreement on the grain size effect for Young's modulus and yield strain, certain MD simulations have led to disagreement for tensile strength. Song et al. showed a decreasing behavior for tensile strength, that is, a pseudo Hall-Petch effect for the small grain size domain up to 5 nm. On the other hand, Sha et al. showed an increasing behavior, a reverse Hall-Petch effect, for grain size domain up to 10 nm. Mortazavi et al. also showed results similar to those of Sha et al. We suspect that the main difference of these two inconsistent results is due to the different modeling. The modeling of polycrystalline graphene with regular size and (hexagonal) shape shows the pseudo Hall-Petch effect, while the modeling with random size and shape shows the reverse Hall-Petch effect. Therefore, this study is conducted to confirm that different modeling is the main reason for the different behavior of tensile strength of the polycrystalline structures. We conducted MD simulations with models derived from the Voronoi tessellation for two types of grain size distributions. One type is grains of relatively similar sizes; the other is grains of random sizes. We found that the pseudo Hall-Petch effect and the reverse Hall-Petch effect of tensile strength were consistently shown for the two different models. We suspect that this result comes from the different crack paths, which are related to the grain patterns in the models.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2016.02a
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• pp.329-329
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• 2016

Large-area graphene films produced by means of chemical vapor deposition (CVD) are polycrystalline and thus contain numerous grain boundaries that can greatly degrade their performance and produce inhomogeneous properties. A better grain boundary engineering in CVD graphene is essential to realize the full potential of graphene in large-scale applications. Here, we report a defect-selective atomic layer deposition (ALD) for stitching grain boundaries of CVD graphene with ZnO so as to increase the connectivity between grains. In the present ALD process, ZnO with hexagonal wurtzite structure was selectively grown mainly on the defect-rich grain boundaries to produce ZnO-stitched CVD graphene with well-connected grains. For the CVD graphene film after ZnO stitching, the inter-grain mobility is notably improved with only a little change in free carrier density. We also demonstrate how ZnO-stitched CVD graphene can be successfully integrated into wafer-scale arrays of top-gated field effect transistors on 4-inch Si and polymer substrates, revealing remarkable device-to-device uniformity.

• Carbon letters
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.151-161
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• 2014

Exceptional progress has been made with chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of graphene in the past few years. Not only has good monolayer growth of graphene been achieved, but large-area synthesis of graphene sheets has been successful too. However, the polycrystalline nature of CVD graphene is hampering further progress as graphene property degrades due to presence of grain boundaries. This review will cover factors that affect nucleation of graphene and how other scientists sought to obtain large graphene domains. In addition, the limitation of the current research trend will be touched upon as well.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.167-171
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• 2014

Using chemical vapor deposition(CVD), the synthesis of graphene was performed on poly and single crystalline Cu substrates. The growth behavior of graphene and its characterization were shown utilizing the optical microscopic image and its image analysis. As a result in the analysis of graphene growth, it was found out the graphene is growing always in particular direction in relation to the crystalline direction of a single grain in polycrystalline Cu substrate. With the image analysis it was possible to show the characterization of graphene, such as the growth direction and the number of layers showing single, double and triple layers, within the neighboring single grains in polycrystalline Cu. In addition, the relatively large area of graphene with about $3mm^2$ on Cu(111) having high quality, single layer, and single crystalline was shown along with its characterization.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2010.02a
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• pp.80-80
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• 2010

Graphene has attracted tremendous attention for the last a few years due to it fascinating electrical, mechanical, and chemical properties. Up to now, several methods have been developed exclusively to prepare graphene, which include micromechanical cleavage, polycrystalline Ni employing chemical vapor deposition technique, solvent thermal reaction, thermal desorption of Si from SiC substrates, chemical routes via graphite intercalation compounds or graphite oxide. In particular, polycrystalline Ni foil and conventional chemical vapor deposition system have been widely used for synthesis of large-area graphene. [1-3] In this study, synthesis of mono-layer graphene on a Ni foil, the mixing ratio of hydrocarbon ($CH_4$) gas to hydrogen gas, microwave power, and growth time were systemically optimized. It is possible to synthesize a graphene at relatively lower temperature ($500^{\circ}C$) than those (${\sim}1000^{\circ}C$) of previous results. Also, we could control the number of graphene according to the growth conditions. The structural features such as surface morphology, crystallinity and number of layer were investigated by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and resonant Raman spectroscopy with 514 nm excitation wavelength. We believe that our approach for the synthesis of mono-layer graphene may be potentially useful for the development of many electronic devices.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2012.08a
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• pp.107-107
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• 2012

Recently, large-area synthesis of high-quality but polycrystalline graphene has been advanced as a scalable route to applications including electronic devices. The presence of grain boundaries (GBs) may be detrimental on some electronic, thermal, and mechanical properties of graphene, including reduced electronic mobility, lower thermal conductivity, and reduced ultimate mechanical strength, yet on the other hand, GBs might be beneficially exploited via controlled GB engineering. The study of graphene grains and their boundary is therefore critical for a complete understanding of this interesting material and for enabling diverse applications. I present that scanning electron diffraction in STEM mode makes possible fast and direct identification of GBs. We also demonstrate that dark field TEM imaging techniques allow facile GB imaging for high-angle tilt GBs in graphene. GB mapping is systematically carried out on large-area graphene samples via these complementary techniques. The study of the detailed atomic structure at a GB in suspended graphene uses aberration-corrected atomic resolution TEM at a low kV.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.122-127
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• 2017

Graphene grown on copper-foil substrates by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) has been attracting interest for sensor applications due to an extraordinary high surface-to-volume ratio and capability of large-scale device fabrication. However, CVD graphene has a polycrystalline structure and a high density of grain boundaries degrading its electrical properties. Recently, processes such as electropolishing for flattening copper substrate has been applied before growth in order to increase the grain size of graphene. In this study, we systemically analyzed the effects of the process condition of electropolishing copper foil on the quality of CVD graphene. We observed that electropolishing process can reduce surface roughness of copper foil, increase the grain size of CVD graphene, and minimize the density of double-layered graphene regions. However, excessive process time can rather increase the copper foil surface roughness and degrade the quality of CVD graphene layers. This work shows that an optimized electropolishing process on copper substrates is critical to obtain high-quality and uniformity CVD graphene which is essential for practical sensor applications.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2013.02a
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• pp.614-614
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• 2013

The effect of graphene growth parameters on the number of graphene layers were systematically studied and growth mechanism on copper substrate was proposed. Parameters that could affect the thickness of graphene growth include the pressure in the system, gas flow rate, growth pressure, growth temperature, and cooling rate. We hypothesis that the partial pressure of both the carbon sources and hydrogen gas in the growth process, which is set by the total pressure and the mole fraction of the feedstock, could be the factor that controls the thickness of the graphene. A synthetic method to produce such large area graphene films with precise thickness from mono- to few-layer would be ideal for chemists and physicists to explore the promising electronic applications of these materials. Here, large-area uniform mono-, bi-, and few-layer graphene films were successfully synthesized on copper surface in selective growth windows, with a finely tuned total pressure and $CH_4$/$H_{2gas}$ ratio. Our findings may facilitate both the large-area synthesis of well-controlled graphene features and wide range of applications of graphene.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.275-279
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• 2016

Chemical vapor deposited (CVD) polycrystalline graphene is widely used for various sensor application because of its extremely large surface-to-volume ratio. The electrical properties of CVD-graphene is significantly affected by the grain size and boundaries (GGBs), but evaluation of GGB of continuous monolayer graphene is difficult. Although several evaluation methods such as tunneling electron microscopy, confocal Raman, UV/ozone-oxidation are typically used, they still have issues in evaluation efficiency and accuracy. In this paper, we suggest an improved evaluation method for precise and simple GGB evaluation which is based on UV/ozone-oxidation and chemical etching process. Using this method, we could observe clear GGBs of CVD-graphene layers grown by different process conditions and statistically evaluate average grain sizes varying from $1.69{\sim}4.43{\mu}m$. This evaluation method can be used for analyzing the correlation between the electrical properties and grain size of CVD-graphene, which is essential for the development of graphene-based sensor devices.