A Review on Flash Sintering of Graphene Oxide Films: Mechanism and Recent Advances in the Field

This review highlights the significance of flash sintering, a photothermal route, in reducing graphene oxide (GO) films. Essentially, extensive efforts are devoted to form graphene electrodes due to its distinctive properties, such as high surface area, excellent electrical conductivity, and optical transparency, owing to which it finds widespread use in energy storage devices, wearable electronics, sensors, and optoelectronics. Thus, rapidly rising market demands for these applications necessitate the need of a technique offering ease of manufacturability and scalability for production of graphene electrodes. The solution-processed graphene electrodes (SPGEs) are promising to fulfil these requirements. Particularly, SPGEs are fabricated by reducing GO film to graphene/reduced graphene oxide (rGO) by utilizing any reduction method, such as chemical, solvothermal, electrochemical, etc. Lately, flash sintering has garnered substantial attention as a promising reduction route for rapid, clean, and green production of graphene electrodes. This review briefly describes the underlying principle, mechanism, and parameters of flash sintering to develop an insight and advantages of this method over extensively used reduction methods. The review is a systematic summarization of the electrical, optical, and microstructural properties of rGO films/electrodes fabricated using this technique.