Mechanical properties of atomically thin boron nitride and the role of interlayer interactions
By A. Falin, Qiran Cai, E. Santos, D. Scullion, D. Qian, Rui Zhang, Zhi Yang, Shaoming Huang, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi and 4 more. Nature Communications, 2017
817 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Atomically thin boron nitride (BN) nanosheets are important two-dimensional nanomaterials with many unique properties distinct from those of graphene, but investigation into their mechanical properties remains incomplete. Here we report that high-quality single-crystalline mono- and few-layer BN nanosheets are one of the strongest electrically insulating materials. More intriguingly, few-layer BN shows mechanical behaviours quite different from those of few-layer graphene under indentation. In striking contrast to graphene, whose strength decreases by more than 30% when the number of layers increases from 1 to 8, the mechanical strength of BN nanosheets is not sensitive to increasing thickness. We attribute this difference to the distinct interlayer interactions and hence sliding tendencies in these two materials under indentation. The significantly better interlayer integrity of BN nanosheets makes them a more attractive candidate than graphene for several applications, for example, as mechanical reinforcements. Atomically thin boron nitride remains undercharacterized in terms of their mechanical properties. Here authors test high-quality mono- and few-layer BN and show it to be one of the strongest electrically insulating materials and dramatically better in interlayer integrity than graphene under indentation.
Subfields: Materials Chemistry
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d0698320360690c94b3177ffbedf1d7485379b28
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In Materials Chemistry
- Yury Gogotsi
- B. Anasori
- Mohamed Alhabeb
- Alexander Sinitskii
- Alexey Lipatov
- R. Joshi
- Alexei Gruverman
- Haidong Lu
Citations in the corpus
- Elastic properties of 2D Ti3C2Tx MXene monolayers and bilayers (2018, background): “(B) Comparison of effective Young’s moduli for several 2D materials: GO (12), rGO (13), MoS2 (5), h-BN (8), and graphene (1).”
- Mechanical properties of two-dimensional materials and their applications (2018, background): “In contrast to graphene, both the elastic modulus and fracture strength are not dependent on thickness variation [139].”
- Multifunctional epoxy nanocomposites reinforced by two-dimensional materials: A review (2021, background): “As mentioned earlier, even though the elastic modulus of hBN is slightly lower compared to graphene, the increase in layer number (up to nine layers) is not expected to degrade significantly its intrinsic mechanical properties [28].”