Surface modification of GO by PDA for dielectric material with well-suppressed dielectric loss

To suppress the high dielectric loss of graphene oxide (GO)/poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) while maintaining high dielectric constant (high- k) near the percolation threshold, in this study, GO nanosheets coated with polydopamine (PDA) were integrated into PVDF to investigate the effects of the PDA shell and its concentrations on the dielectric properties of the nanocomposites. The results indicate that the dissipation factor and conductivity of the GO@PDA/PVDF are significantly suppressed to very low values compared with the pristine GO/PVDF composites, attributable to the PDA interlayer between the GO nanosheets which prevents them from direct contact with each other and remarkably reduces the leakage loss. Furthermore, activation energies of the GO/PVDF and GO@PDA/PVDF composites were calculated as 1.247 and 0.884 eV, respectively, indicating that the presence of PDA interlayer reduces the relaxation activation energy and makes the relaxation occur at low temperature for the GO@PDA/PVDF. The prepared GO@PDA/PVDF nanocomposites with high- k but low loss have potential applications in microelectronic engineering.