Chemical vapor deposition derived flexible graphene paper and its application as high performance anodes for lithium rechargeable batteries

We present a novel approach to fabricate flexible graphene papers using chemical vapor deposition (CVD) derived graphene. Expanded vermiculite was used as a layered template in the CVD process to produce bulk materials containing graphene sheets of the order of hundreds of microns at a gram scale. Meshes or carbon nanotubes can be introduced into the graphene sheets by template pretreating. Owing to the large sheet size, the as-obtained graphene sheets were easily fabricated into flexible graphene papers with low surface density and good conductivity, which exhibited greatly enhanced reversible capacity (1350 mA h g−1 at 50 mA g−1) and cycling performance as anodes for lithium rechargeable batteries as compared to the graphene papers fabricated using reduced graphene oxide.