Graphene fatigue through van der Waals interactions

Teng Cui; Kevin Yip; Aly Hassan; Guorui Wang; Xingjian Liu; Yu Sun; Tobin Filleter

doi:10.1126/sciadv.abb1335

Graphene fatigue through van der Waals interactions

Sci Adv. 2020 Oct 14;6(42):eabb1335. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abb1335. Print 2020 Oct.

Authors

Teng Cui¹, Kevin Yip¹, Aly Hassan¹, Guorui Wang¹, Xingjian Liu¹, Yu Sun², Tobin Filleter²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S3G8, Canada.
² Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S3G8, Canada. sun@mie.utoronto.ca filleter@mie.utoronto.ca.

Abstract

Graphene is often in contact with other materials through weak van der Waals (vdW) interactions. Of particular interest is the graphene-polymer interface, which is constantly subjected to dynamic loading in applications, including flexible electronics and multifunctional coatings. Through in situ cyclic loading, we directly observed interfacial fatigue propagation at the graphene-polymer interface, which was revealed to satisfy a modified Paris' law. Furthermore, cyclic loading through vdW contact was able to cause fatigue fracture of even pristine graphene through a combined in-plane shear and out-of-plane tear mechanism. Shear fracture was found to mainly initiate at the fold junctions induced by cyclic loading and propagate parallel to the loading direction. Fracture mechanics analysis was conducted to explain the kinetics of an exotic self-tearing behavior of graphene during cyclic loading. This work offers mechanistic insights into the dynamic reliability of graphene and graphene-polymer interface, which could facilitate the durable design of graphene-based structures.

Copyright © 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).