The development of graphene and graphene-like materials has been a breakthrough in the field of nanotechnology for its exceptional properties. It exhibits extraordinary properties owing to its unique, regular arrangement of carbon atoms in it. However, graphene is usually modified for specific applications, by introducing disorder in the system. Since disorders are ubiquitous during the synthesis of graphene and graphene-like materials, it is best to exploit the defects for tuning its exceptional properties for suitable device applications. Like in any material, the disorder can drastically affect the properties, and hence they are deliberately incorporated into the material. In this review, we discuss topics related to the creation and configuration of disorders in graphene such as corrugations, topological defects, vacancies, adatoms and sp3- defects. The effects of these disorders on the electrical, thermal, chemical and mechanical properties of graphene are analysed subsequently. Finally, we review earlier works on the modulation of structural defects in graphene for specific applications.

Research on Graphene and its importance in the field of energy conversion and storage devices such as fuel cells, batteries, supercapacitors and solar cells has gained momentum recently. It is studied to be the most suitable electrode material for enhanced performance of supercapacitors in terms of charge–discharge cycles, specific capacitance, high power and energy densities and so on, specifically due to its high conductivity and large theoretical surface area. Unfortunately, it posits lot of challenges due to its irreversible stacking between the individual sheets resulting in the decrease in the Specific Surface Area (SSA) compared to the theoretically reported values. Numerous studies have been carried out to prevent this stacking in order to increase the surface area, thereby being a more suitable material for the manufacture of electrodes for supercapacitors as its capacitance greatly depends on the electrode material. To solve this problem, the conversion of two-dimensional graphene sheets to three-dimensional crumpled graphene structure has been verified to be the most effective approach. The study of crumpled graphene has been one of the recent trends in the field of energy storage applications in consumer electronics and hybrid vehicles as the process of crumpling can be controlled to suit the prospective device applications.