A computational study of mechanical and electrical properties of zigzag graphene nanoribbon force sensor

Abstract

Force sensors have many applications in new technologies such as robotic systems, medical tools and electronics. Therefore, it is necessary to make high sensitivity force sensors. Nanomaterials are very useful for making these sensors. In this paper, we study the mechanical and electrical properties of zigzag graphene nanoribbon force sensor by classical molecular dynamics (MD) with reactive force field (Reaxff) and density functional based tight binding (DFTB) combined with non-equilibrium Green's function (NEGF) method. Our results show that the bending angle, potentials energy, bond energy and deflection distance increase with increasing external force, while distance between tip and nanoribbon and electrical conductivity decrease. In addition, to study the electrical properties of force sensor, we calculated the local density of states (LDOS), density of states (DOS) and transmission spectrum. Our results show that these quantities change by external force. So we can measure them to judge the operation of sensor.