Issue 21, 2016

From brittle to ductile: a structure dependent ductility of diamond nanothread

Abstract

As a potential building block for the next generation of devices/multifunctional materials that are spreading in almost every technology sector, one-dimensional (1D) carbon nanomaterial has received intensive research interests. Recently, a new ultra-thin diamond nanothread (DNT) has joined this palette, which is a 1D structure with poly-benzene sections connected by Stone–Wales (SW) transformation defects. Using large-scale molecular dynamics simulations, we found that this sp3 bonded DNT can transition from brittle to ductile behaviour by varying the length of the poly-benzene sections, suggesting that DNT possesses entirely different mechanical responses than other 1D carbon allotropes. Analogously, the SW defects behave like a grain boundary that interrupts the consistency of the poly-benzene sections. For a DNT with a fixed length, the yield strength fluctuates in the vicinity of a certain value and is independent of the “grain size”. On the other hand, both yield strength and yield strain show a clear dependence on the total length of DNT, which is due to the fact that the failure of the DNT is dominated by the SW defects. Its highly tunable ductility together with its ultra-light density and high Young's modulus makes diamond nanothread ideal for the creation of extremely strong three-dimensional nano-architectures.

Graphical abstract: From brittle to ductile: a structure dependent ductility of diamond nanothread

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
23 Mar 2016
Accepted
09 May 2016
First published
10 May 2016
This article is Open Access
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Nanoscale, 2016,8, 11177-11184

From brittle to ductile: a structure dependent ductility of diamond nanothread

H. Zhan, G. Zhang, V. B. C. Tan, Y. Cheng, J. M. Bell, Y. Zhang and Y. Gu, Nanoscale, 2016, 8, 11177 DOI: 10.1039/C6NR02414A

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