  The production of large area interfaces and the use of scalable methods to
build-up designed nanostructures generating advanced functional properties are
of high interest for many materials science applications. Nevertheless, large
area coverage remains a major problem for pristine graphene and here we present
a hybrid, composite graphene-like material soluble in water, which can be
exploited in many areas, such as energy storage, electrodes fabrication,
selective membranes and biosensing. Graphene oxide (GO) was produced by the
traditional Hummers method being further reduced in the presence of
poly(styrene sulfonate) sodium salt (PSS), thus creating stable reduced
graphene oxide (rGO) nanoplateles wrapped by PSS (GPSS). Molecular dynamics
simulations were carried out of further clarify the interactions between PSS
molecules and rGO nanoplatelets, with calculations supported by FTIR analysis.
The intermolecular forces between rGO nanoplatelets and PSS lead to the
formation of a hybrid material (GPSS) stabilized by van der Waals forces,
allowing the fabrication of high quality layer-by-layer (LbL) films with
polyalillamine hydrochloride (PAH). Raman and electrical characterizations
corroborated the successful modifications in the electronic structures from GO
to GPSS after the chemical treatment, resulting in (PAH/GPSS) LbL films four
orders of magnitude more conductive than (PAH/GO).
