Nanomechanics of Low-Dimensional Materials for Functional Applications
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Nanoscale Horizons View Article Online FOCUS View Journal | View Issue Nanomechanics of low-dimensional materials for functional applications Cite this: Nanoscale Horiz., 2019, 4,781 Sufeng Fan, †a Xiaobin Feng, †a Ying Han, †a Zhengjie Fanab and Yang Lu *acd When materials’ characteristic dimensions are reduced to the nanoscale regime, their mechanical properties will vary significantly to that of their bulk counterparts. Recently low-dimensional materials, including one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) nanomaterials, have attracted the widespread attention of academia and industry because of their unique (e.g., thermal, optical, electrical, catalytic) properties. These outstanding properties give them a wide variety of functional applications; however, reliable devices and practical applications call for high structural reliability and mechanical robustness of these nanoscale building blocks. Therefore, there is a need to investigate and characterize the nanomechanical properties and deformation mechanisms of low-dimensional materials but this remains highly challenging. In this Focus article, we summarize the recent progress made in the nanomechanical studies on some representative 1D/2D crystalline nanomaterials, with a special emphasis on experimental research. Furthermore, the unconventional mechanical properties, such as the significantly enhanced elasticity, of these low-dimensional crystals can lead to unprecedented physical and chemical property changes, which may fundamentally change the way such materials conduct electricity/heat, transmit/emit Received 24th February 2019, light, and their involvement in chemical reactions. Therefore, the nanomechanical approach can be also Accepted 11th April 2019 used to tailor the materials’ functional properties and performance, by so-called strain engineering, which DOI: 10.1039/c9nh00118b can open up new avenues to explore how devices can be designed and fabricated with even more dramatic changes in low-dimensional crystalline materials for information processing, communications, rsc.li/nanoscale-horizons biomedical, and energy applications. Published on 26 April 2019. Downloaded 9/27/2021 11:15:40 AM. Introduction nanomechanical and nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS). However, compared with their fancy functional properties, their With the rapid progress toward miniaturization and scalable mechanical property, which is also an important factor in most integration in the microelectronics industry, the design and practical applications, has drawn relatively less attention in fabrication of small-scale materials with desired mechanical, nanomaterials research. Actually, many existing studies, including electrical, thermal, and optical properties are still great challenges. our recent works,2–4 have clearly shown that miniaturization can Meanwhile, in the past decades, with the rapid development of give entirely different mechanical properties to conventional nanoscience and nanotechnology, low-dimensional materials crystalline materials because of the reduced size and high including one-dimensional (1D) nanomaterials (nanotubes, nano- surface-to-volume, creating great impacts on the design, manu- wires, etc.) and two-dimensional (2D) materials (graphene, layered facturing, and service life of the relevant components, which are MoS2, etc.), have become promising candidates for functional device vital in the practical application of low-dimensional materials- components.1 As shown in Fig. 1, these emerging nanomaterials based functional devices. The size-dependent mechanical and have become key building blocks for future nanodevices and fracture behavior of crystalline materials at the nanoscale have thus generated great interest in the solid mechanics community a Department of Mechanical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, because of their importance to the assembly, performance, and Hong Kong. E-mail: [email protected] reliability of functional nanodevices and NEMS. Apart from b State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong reliable functional device applications, recent studies suggest University, 710049, Xi’an, China that the nanomechanics study of low-dimensional crystalline c Department of Materials Science and Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, materials could also provide a venue to manipulate and precisely Kowloon, Hong Kong d CityU-Xidian Joint Laboratory of Micro/Nano-Manufacturing, Shenzhen 518057, tune the physical properties of the nanomaterials under applied China mechanical loading, which is related to the concept of ‘‘strain † These authors contributed equally to this work. engineering,’’ which is based on the fact that a material’s physical This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2019 Nanoscale Horiz., 2019, 4, 781--788 | 781 View Article Online Focus Nanoscale Horizons device applications are also discussed herein. More importantly, we also introduce some most recent development on the ‘‘elastic strain engineering’’ (ESE) of low-dimensional crystalline materials, which may bring enormous new opportunities in nanomechanics research. One-dimensional metallic crystalline materials Metallic nanopillars, nanowires (NWs) and nanorods (NRs), with diameters ranging from a few to hundreds of nanometers, have stimulated great interest recently as important building blocks for future micro/nanoelectronics and electromechanical devices in various industrial applications. Therefore, their mechanical performance plays a key role in their reliability and other functional applications. Among various research studies, the size effect of metallic nanocrystals has received most interest in the nanomechanics community during the past decades. In the mechanical behavior of metallic materials, Fig. 1 Classification and some examples of low-dimensional (1D/2D) the size effect includes both an internal size effect and external crystalline nanomaterials. size effect. Among these, the internal size effect is primarily related to boundaries and is depicted as the classic ‘‘Hall– Petch’’ relationship, with the principle being ‘‘smaller is stronger.’’ and chemical properties are functions of the lattice parameters of However, when grain sizes decrease into the nanocrystalline the underlying crystal lattice or the elastic strain, ee,withrespect regime, their limited ductility/deformability becomes the Achilles’ to the stress-free reference state. Fundamentally, the electronic heel of these ultrastrong nanocrystals. At the nanoscale, the structure (band gap) changes with ee.Therefore,manyphysicaland sample size or the external size has an even greater effect and chemical properties can depend on the mechanical strain: strongly influences the mechanical properties, and here, even thermal, magnetic, transport, and electro-optical characteristics, nanolattices have demonstrated superior compressive specific and the catalytic activities, which vary sensitively with ee.Moreover, strength and recoverability that are quite different from their bulk unlike some other ways of changing a material’s properties, such counterparts.12,13 Crystalline metallic pillars with diameters span- as by chemical doping, which produce a permanent, static change, ning from tens of micrometers to hundreds of nanometers Published on 26 April 2019. Downloaded 9/27/2021 11:15:40 AM. mechanical straining allows the properties to be changed on the demonstrated strong size effects when subjected to uniaxial fly. So, the ‘‘strain engineering’’ of low-dimensional crystalline compression,14,15 and it was found that dislocations would emit materials has become a new trend in the design and fabrication from the free surfaces instead of the interior when the diameter of novel nanoelectronics and optoelectronic devices. decreases to hundreds of nanometers.16 Consequently, unconven- Past study of both the mechanical properties and deformation- tional deformation mechanisms, including dislocation starvation,17 induced physical property changes of low-dimensional crystalline surface dislocation self-multiplication18 and mechanical annealing,19 materials were mostly performed using theoretical and com- may occur. In this case, on the basis of the 1D metallic characteristic, putational methods because of the great challenges involved in some new applications arise from nano-fabrication; for instance, experiments. Over the past two decades, due to the rapid LIGA (a German acronym for lithographie, galvanoformung, development and advancement of nano-fabrication and char- abformung, which means lithography, electroplating, and molding) acterization techniques, such as focused ion beam (FIB), in situ nickel with predominant mechanical performance has been electron microscopy (SEM/TEM), atomic force microscopy, and used in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) for elevated nanoindentation, researchers can now perform real experiments temperatures.20 Crystalline metallic NWs exhibit remarkably to observe and quantify the intriguing mechanical properties, enhanced strengths, even ultrahigh yield strength that reaches including the strength, elastic strain, and plasticity, of individual their ideal strength, which is attributed to their reduced surface nanostructures, by using methods such as nanoindentation,5 areas, dense nanotwins, uniform dislocation nucleation, and resonance,6 uniaxial loading,2,7 bending tests,4,8,9 and fatigue them being low or even defect free, etc.12,13,21 For characterizing tests.10,11 So this Focus article reviews the state-of-art progress