To-Pack or Not-to-Pack: Towards Improved Graphite Electrochemical Oxidation Through Electrode Design

Fabrication of batch-wise efficient, user- and environmentally-friendly, and well-defined yield methods for the synthesis of graphite oxide, the main precursor to graphene oxide and its reduced derivative, is an essential and robust research field, yet is sparingly investigated or innovated in recent years. This concept review showcases recent potential advances in the fabrication of electrochemical electrodes that meet aforementioned design parameters, wherein working electrode construction is seen to play a key role in shaping the yield characteristics and aiding the mechanistic understanding of efficiency of adopted methods. Particularly, those advances pave the way for new and various tunable design parameters by fabricating different methods of encapsulating graphite powder instead of using conventional bare monolith forms of graphite as working electrode. Encapsulation geometry, pressure, and matrix material, as well as powder size are examples of such tunable design parameters which are lacking in the monolith methods. The encapsulation validates authenticity of real-time monitoring of electrochemical intercalation, exfoliation, and oxidation of graphite powder, thereby offering excellent and well-defined control on yield.