Direct fabrication of graphene oxide fiber by injection spinning for flexible and wearable electronics

Preparation of the graphene-containing fibers is an important step in the fabrication of advanced materials. However, using conventional techniques, e.g., wet or dry spinning, requires sophisticated recipes for fabricating the graphene oxide (GO) fibers because the GO dispersion has a low viscosity and it cannot be directly used for spinning. In this work, a simple and reliable procedure, injection spinning (IS), for a direct spinning of GO is reported. According to IS, the thin flow which is squeezed-out from a nozzle forms a flat fiber and provides the spinning drawing force to break the weak spinning thin flow of the GO water–ethanol suspension. The GO flat fiber is finally obtained by drying at a low temperature of 50 °C. The GO flat fiber is twisted and reduced by HI resulting in a production of the reduced GO (rGO) yarn. After passing the relevant characterization test, we show that varying the spinning speed changes the morphology of the rGO yarns on microscale without the appearance of appreciable changes on the nanoscale. The rGO yarns are characterized by high values of Young’s modulus about 1.5 GPa. An application is demonstrated using IS for flexible and wearable electronics.