Abstract
Type-II glass-like carbon is a widely used material with a unique combination of properties including low density, high strength, extreme impermeability to gas and liquid and resistance to chemical corrosion. It can be considered as a carbon-based nanoarchitectured material, consisting of a disordered multilayer graphene matrix encasing numerous randomly distributed nanosized fullerene-like spheroids. Here we show that under both hydrostatic compression and triaxial deformation, this high-strength material is highly compressible and exhibits a superelastic ability to recover from large strains. Under hydrostatic compression, bulk, shear and Young's moduli decrease anomalously with pressure, reaching minima around 1-2 GPa, where Poisson's ratio approaches zero, and then revert to normal behaviour with positive pressure dependences. Controlling the concentration, size and shape of fullerene-like spheroids with tailored topological connectivity to graphene layers is expected to yield exceptional and tunable mechanical properties, similar to mechanical metamaterials, with potentially wide applications.
Highlights
Type-II glass-like carbon is a widely used material with a unique combination of properties including low density, high strength, extreme impermeability to gas and liquid and resistance to chemical corrosion
Glass-like carbon (GC), a class of nongraphitizing carbon made by firing polymeric precursors such as phenolic resin or furfuryl alcohol resin in an inert atmosphere, possesses a number of advantageous properties including low density, high hardness and strength, high impermeability to both gases and liquids, high temperature stability and extreme resistance to chemical corrosion[10]
Type-II GC can be envisaged as fullerene-like spheroids (FLS) encased in disordered graphene layers possessing a Swiss-cheese like nanostructure (Fig. 1), which has a number of similarities to mechanical metamaterials[20], but with statistical characteristic building blocks at nanometre scales
Summary
Type-II glass-like carbon is a widely used material with a unique combination of properties including low density, high strength, extreme impermeability to gas and liquid and resistance to chemical corrosion. It can be considered as a carbon-based nanoarchitectured material, consisting of a disordered multilayer graphene matrix encasing numerous randomly distributed nanosized fullerene-like spheroids. On the basis of the structure of type-II GC (Fig. 1), with the aid of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, an atomistic model is proposed to explain the unusual, and pressure-tunable, compression and elastic properties of type-II GC This points to potential routes for developing new carbon-based nanoarchitectured materials with a unique combination of desired properties such as high compressibility, superelasticity, high toughness and zero/negative Poisson’s ratio, in addition to other known attractive properties
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