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

• DOI: 10.1039/c6nr02414a
• Publication Date: 2016-05-10T08:33:06Z
• Authors: Haifei Zhan; Gang Zhang; Vincent B. C. Tan; Yuan Cheng; John M. Bell; Yong-Wei Zhang; Yuantong Gu
• Keywords: Ductility (Earth science); Brittleness; Carbon fibers

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