Synthesis and characterization of graphene-palladium thin film composites for nano-gilding

Graphene is a superior material that exhibits excellent mechanical and electrical properties, as well as being useful for chemical functionalities. A few layers of graphene are extremely lightweight but highly multifunctional, and as such present an opportunity to add increasing performance to engineering design. However, it is difficult to uniformly apply a few layers of graphene directly onto materials, while maintaining the intrinsic properties of synthesized graphene and a strong interfacial strength between them. To the end of synthesizing useful graphene-based composites, chemical vapor deposition (CVD) growth of graphene on thin palladium leaves is studied for the potential of nano-gilding based coating of surfaces for added functionality. This work presents the study of gas-precursor CVD synthesis of mulit-layer graphene (MLG) on commercial palladium leaves at low temperature (800 ˚C). Raman mapping methods and nanoindentation for hardness of the composites are presented, as well as a discussion of the limitations on these techniques to analyze the present samples