Graphene is 200 times stronger than steel and can be as much as six times lighter. These characteristics alone make it a popular material in manufacturing. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently uncovered more properties of graphene sheets that can benefit industry.
Doctoral student Soumendu Bagchi, along with his adviser Huck Beng Chew in the Department of Aerospace Engineering in collaboration with Harley Johnson from Mechanical Sciences and Engineering identified how twisted graphene sheets behave and their stability at different sizes and temperatures.
"We concentrated on two graphene sheets stacked on top of each other but with a twist angle," said Bagchi. "We did atomistic simulations at different temperatures for different sizes of graphene sheets. Using insights from these simulations, we developed an analytical model—you can plug in any sheet size, any twist angle, and the model will predict the number of local stable states it has as well as the critical temperature required to reach each of those states."
To read more, click here.