Summary: | The efficiency of two wet chemical processes based on hydroiodic acid (HI) and sodium borohydride (NaBH<sub>4</sub>) used to reduce graphene oxide (GO) have been studied. At this aim, the oxygen abundance of reduced graphene oxide (rGO) was studied as a function of the reductant concentration. A number of rGO samples were produced and their chemical compositions were studied using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The analyses show that the reduction of the oxygen concentration proceeds non-linearly. At the beginning, when pristine GO is utilized a higher extent of reduction is obtained. The oxygen concentration decreases from ~32% to 10.5% by increasing the HI concentration to 0.24 M. A steeper reduction was observed for NaBH<sub>4</sub>, where the oxygen concentration lowers to ~13.6% using just 50 mg of NaBH<sub>4</sub>. Next, reduction reactions performed with increasing amounts of reductants in aqueous suspensions show a progressive saturation effect, indicating a limit in the final oxygen concentration. We obtained a residual oxygen concentration of 5.3% using 7.58 M of HI and 8.6% with 1200 mg of NaBH<sub>4.</sub> The chemical analysis highlights that the reduction of the oxygen concentration in rGO samples is mainly derived from the cleavage of C-OH bonds and the next reconstruction of C-C bonds.
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