Mechanical behavior enhancement of defective graphene sheet employing boron nitride coating via atomistic study

The most stable form of boron nitride polymorph naming hexagonal boron nitride sheet has recently been widely concerned like graphite due to its interesting features such as electrical insulation and high thermal conductivity. In this study, the molecular dynamic simulations are implemented to investigate the mechanical properties of single-layer graphene sheets under tensile and compressive loadings in the absence and presence of boron–nitride coating layers. In this introduced hybrid nanostructure, the benefit of combining both individual interesting features of graphene and boron–nitride sheets such as exceptional mechanical and electrical properties can be simultaneously achieved for future potential application in nano devices. The influences of chiral indices, boundary conditions and presence of mono-atomic vacancy defects as well as coating dimension on the mechanical behavior of the resulted hybrid structure are reported. The interatomic forces between the atoms are modeled by employing the AIREBO and Tersoff–Brenner potentials for carbon–carbon and boron–nitrogen atoms in each layer, respectively. Furthermore, the van der Waal interlayer forces of carbon–boron and carbon–nitrogen are estimated by the Lennard–Jones potential field. Besides the potential improvement in electrical and physical properties of the nanostructure, it is demonstrated that the buckling load capacity of the fully coated graphene sheet with 3% concentration of mono-atomic vacancy defects noticeably enhances by amounts of 24.1%.