Insights in The Chemical Composition of Graphene Oxide via A Simple and Versatile Fluorescent Labelling Method

Abstract

Graphene oxide (GO) is a promising 2D material with a complex chemical structure which characterization remains as a challenge. The widely-accepted chemical structure of GO includes epoxides, hydroxyls and carboxylic acids. Recently, alkene groups of GO have been used for selective GO functionalization. Despite the different efforts that exist to elucidate the exact GO chemical structure, the chemical composition of the main GO functionalities is fairly limited. By knowing the GO chemical composition, chemical strategies can be developed to create improved GO-based materials. Herein, we reported a simple and versatile fluorescent approach based on fluorescamine for the quantification of GO functionalities. This method offers important advantages such as highly selectivity, reliability, rapid quantification in bulk and can be extended to follow any primary amine containing molecule grafted onto GO.