Graphene Glass: Direct Growth of Graphene on Traditional Glasses

Glass, an amorphous oxide material with a long history, is widely used in our daily life. Graphene is a novel two-dimensional material formed by carbon atoms. The unique properties of graphene, such as excellent mechanical strength, high electrical and thermal conductivity and optical transparency, serve as complementary components to those of glass. Therefore, the combination of graphene and glass would endow noticeable electrical/thermal conductivity and surface hydrophobicity without sacrificing the transparency of conventional glass. Previously reported routes for integrating graphene with glass mainly used solution-casting of liquid-exfoliated graphene nanoplatelets and transfer-coating of graphene films grown on metals. Compared with the existing methods, the direct growth of graphene on glass could avoid contamination and damage during the integration process, thereby resulting in good graphene quality and scalability, high thickness/ coverage uniformity, much reduced breakage density, and a tight and clean interface with the underlying glass. In this article,.we review our recent progress on the direct growth of graphene on various glass by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). With the consideration of the thermo-stabilities of glass and application requirements, three different CVD routes are developed, i.e., high-temperature, atmospheric pressure CVD on solid-state thermostable glass and molten-state glass, as well as low-temperature plasma enhanced CVD on solid-state soda-lime floating glass. We also explore the practical applications of the as-grown graphene glass, where electrochromic windows, defoggers, cell proliferation, and photocatalytic plates were fabricated based on our CVD-grown graphene glass. The high performance of these devices promises practical usage of graphene glass in daily-life applications.