The highs and lows of graphene’s strength

The highs and lows of graphene’s strength. Since Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov first touched off the graphene “gold rush” in 2004, researchers have been pursuing ways to scale up its production. Among graphene’s remarkable properties is its roughly 100-GPa tensile strength, which is 40 times greater than the value for steel. That, however, is for defect-free graphene sheets; when formed by chemical vapor deposition, a proven industrial technique, graphene sheets contain crystallites separated by grain boundaries (see the news story in PHYSICS TODAY, Physics Today 

 0031-9228 63 8 2010 15  https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3480063 August 2010, page 15 ). Now, a computational study by Rassin Grantab and Vivek Shenoy at Brown University and Rodney Ruoff at the University of Texas at Austin reveals that graphene sheets with highly misaligned boundaries are actually stronger than slightly misaligned ones. As the image shows, misaligned grain boundaries consist of repeating pairs of...