Non-Aqueous Approach to Synthesize Amorphous/Crystalline Metal Oxide-Graphene Nanosheet Hybrid Composites

Presently, there is a dramatically increasing interest in developing graphene-supported nanocomposites, due to their unprecedented properties. Apart from the methods exposed in previous studies, this work presents a nonaqueous approach of using atomic layer deposition (ALD) to constitute novel metal oxide-graphene hybrid nanocomposites based on graphene nanosheet (GNS) powders. It is demonstrated that this gas−solid strategy exhibits many unique benefits. It reports for the first time that the as-prepared SnO 2 -GNS nanocomposites are featured with not only tunable morphologies but controllable amorphous and crystalline phases of SnO 2 component as well, using SnCl 4 and H 2 O as the ALD precursors. Furthermore, the determinant factors and underlying mechanisms were outlined and discussed in this work. As a consequence, besides the demonstration of ALD as an important approach for nanoarchitecturing novel metal oxide-GNS composites, the as-synthesized SnO 2 -GNS hybrid nanocomposites provide more choices for many important applications, such as lithium-ion batteries, solar cells, and gas sensing.