The mechanical response of glassy carbon recovered from high pressure

X Huang and TB Shiell and C de Tomas and I Suarez-Martinez and S Wong and S Mann and DR McKenzie and NA Marks and DG McCulloch and JE Bradby, JOURNAL OF APPLIED PHYSICS, 127 (2020).

DOI: 10.1063/1.5142309

Glassy carbon (GC) is usually considered the prototypical super-elastic material, which can almost fully recover its shape after compression of several gigapascals (GPa). In this work, nanoindentation is used to study the mechanical response of GC, which was subjected to a range of high pressures using a diamond anvil cell (DAC). We show that GC starts to lose its elasticity after compression to 6GPa and becomes clearly mechanically anisotropic after being compressed beyond similar to 30GPa. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are used to calculate Young's modulus before and after compression. Through our experimental results and MD simulations, we show that the elasticity of GC is at a minimum around 30GPa but recovers after compression to higher pressures along the DAC compression axis.

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