Extraordinary tensile strength and ductility of scalable nanoporous graphene

Graphene grows up

30 September 2019

Large, three-dimensional blocks of graphene can combine low weight with exceptional strength, material scientists have shown.

A single-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms, graphene is renowned for its remarkable physical properties, including its ultrahigh strength and stiffness. However, three-dimensional materials made from stacked layers of graphene usually lack such strength because the weak bonds between the graphene layers break easily when the material is placed under tension.

Researchers from the Advanced Institute of Materials Research (AIMR) at Tohoku University are part of a team that has developed a way to grow graphene sheets into a three-dimensional structure that is seamless and porous. Eliminating the weak bonding between layers ensured that this three-dimensional structure retained the exceptional strength of two-dimensional graphene. The material also preserved the excellent electronic properties seen in single graphene sheets. It could thus find use in a wide range of functional and structural applications.

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References

1. Science Advances 5, eaat6951 (2019). doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aat6951