Mechanical responses of pristine and defective hexagonal boron-nitride nanosheets: A molecular dynamics investigation

M Salavati and A Mojahedin and AHN Shirazi, FRONTIERS OF STRUCTURAL AND CIVIL ENGINEERING, 14, 623-631 (2020).

DOI: 10.1007/s11709-020-0616-5

In this work we conducted classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulation to investigate the mechanical characteristics and failure mechanism of hexagonal boron-nitride (h-BN) nanosheets. Pristine and defective structure of h-BN nanosheets were considered under the uniaxial tensile loadings at various temperatures. The defective structure contains three types of the most common initial defects in engineering materials that are known as cracks, notches (with various length/size), and point vacancy defects (with a wide range of concentration). MD simulation results demonstrate a high load-bearing capacity of extremely defective (amorphized) h-BN nanosheets. Our results also reveal that the tensile strength decline by increasing the defect content and temperature as well. Our MD results provide a comprehensive and useful vision concerning the mechanical properties of h-BN nanosheets with/without defects, which is very critical for the designing of nanodevices exploiting the exceptional physics of h-BN.

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