Abstracts Book - IMRC 2018

• SA1-P026
FABRICATION OF GRAPHENE ELECTRODES BASED ON CARBON-
MEMS TECHNOLOGY
Sveidy Vaca 1 , Axel Ricardo Rodríguez Gomez 2 , Oscar Pilloni 1 , Laura Natalia Serkovic Loli 3 , Laura
Oropeza Ramos 4
1
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Programa de Maestria y Doctorado en Ingenieria,
Mexico. 2 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Facultad de Ciencias, Mexico.
3 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Fisica, Mexico. 4 Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, Facultad de Ingenieria, Mexico.
Carbon is one of the most studied chemical elements due to the different
properties exhibited by its allotropes which can be used for a wide range of
possible applications. In recent years, one of the most studied allotropes has
been graphene, a two-dimensional material, because of its outstanding
properties. However, conventional methods to produce it, which have been
developed and used commercially, generate monolayers or multilayers of
graphene on a catalytic metal (copper foil) with no specific design. These
methods require etching away the metal foil and transferring the ultra-thin
carbon layer to a specific purpose substrate, this latter process usually results
in polymer residue contamination and in defect formation on the graphene film
which changes its properties.
Recent works reported graphene layers obtained by the diffusion of carbon in
nickel films using different carbon sources like polymethyl methacrylate
(PMMA), high impact polystryrene (HIPS), acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene (ABS),
or gas flow of methane. In particular, Carbon-MEMS technology consists of a
thermochemical decomposition of a polymer precursor in an inert atmosphere.
Using photosensitive polymers as precursor is highly attractive due to the fact
that micro-shapes can be defined by photolithographic means previous to the
pyrolysis process, which can produce functional carbon-based devices for
industrial applications. In this work, we induce the diffusion of pyrolytic carbon
atoms by annealing a previously micro-defined structure by SU-8
photolithography plus a standard pyrolysis process, using different nickel layer
thicknesses. Annealing time and temperature were the controlled variables.
Finally, acidic etching was used to remove the remaining nickel, leaving the final
graphitic micro-structures. Characterization of each process step was
performed using an optical profilometer, SEM microscopy, Raman spectroscopy
and EDS, in order to study the transition a polymer material to a graphitic