Tailoring the hardness of aluminum surface reinforced with graphene and C3N nanosheets

Abstract

In this study, the performance of C3N, a single-layer crystalline carbon nitride, under out-of-plane loading is investigated and compared with graphene. For this purpose, molecular dynamics simulations are performed to simulate the nanoindentation process on a single-layer C3N and graphene nanosheet. A significant increase in the penetrating force is observed by adding nanomaterials to the aluminum surface. Comparing the effect of graphene and C3N shows more considerable hysteresis of C3N coating. This is mainly due to the higher penetration force of the C3N coating on the retraction path. C3N nanosheet was found 2.72% harder than graphene in the indentation test. Voronoi analysis shows that when nanomaterials are coated on aluminum, the relationship of the Voronoi surfaces of the atoms at the surface with the aluminum atoms as the substrate is generally different from that of the substrate Voronoi surfaces. The frequency of the imposed stress wave of indenter onto the midline of the substrate when the substrate coated with C3N is higher than graphene. This can be seen as evidence for the distribution of Voronoi vectors and the larger C3N hysteresis loop.