A Study on Image Analysis of Graphene Oxide Using Optical Microscopy

Abstract

Experimental considerations have been performed to obtain the clear optical microscopic images ofgraphene oxide which are useful to probe its quality and morphological information such as a shape, a size, and athickness. In this study, we investigated the contrast enhancement of the optical images of graphene oxide afterhydrazine vapor reduction on a Si substrate coated with a 300 nm-thick SiO2 dielectric layer. Also, a green-filteredlight source gave higher contrast images comparing to optical images under standard white light. Furthermore, it wasfound that a image channel separation technique can be an alternative to simply identify the morphologicalinformation of graphene oxide, where red, green, and blue color values are separated at each pixels of the opticalimage. The approaches performed in this study can be helpful to set up a simple and easy protocol for themorphological identification of graphene oxide using a conventional optical microscope instead of a scanning electronmicroscopy or an atomic force microscopy.