The microscopic deformation mechanism of 3D graphene foam materials under uniaxial compression

Chao Wang, Cun Zhang, Shaohua Chen*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

57 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Recent experiments have shown that the graphene foam material exhibits a rubber-like constitutive behavior and a near-zero Poisson's ratio. We have performed coarse grain molecular dynamics simulations, which show that these intriguing phenomena can be attributed to the microstructure deformation, rearrangement and compaction in three stages, respectively. The elastic deformation of microstructures leads to the initial linear behavior of the graphene foam material. Microstructure rearrangement, including bending, self-folding and flake-rotation, should be responsible for the second stage with a good performance of deformation but with a low bearing capacity. Microstructure compaction leads to a high bearing capacity at the last stage. A near-zero Poisson's ratio of the material within a certain range of compressive strain is also found to be due to the microstructure rearrangement, which induces soft flakes to fill the empty space without volume expansion in the other directions. Furthermore, it demonstrates that Poisson's ratio of such a type of material can be further tuned by the stiffness of graphene flakes as well as the amplitude of external strain. This study highlights the promise of graphene foam materials for energy absorption and dissipation under extreme conditions.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)666-672
Number of pages7
JournalCarbon
Volume109
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Nov 2016

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