Abstract
One of the characteristics of polycrystalline graphene that determines its material properties is grain size. Mechanical properties such as Young's modulus, yield strain and tensile strength depend on the grain size and show a reverse Hall-Petch effect at small grain size limit for some properties under certain conditions. While there is agreement on the grain size effect for Young's modulus and yield strain, certain MD simulations have led to disagreement for tensile strength. Song et al. showed a decreasing behavior for tensile strength, that is, a pseudo Hall-Petch effect for the small grain size domain up to 5 nm. On the other hand, Sha et al. showed an increasing behavior, a reverse Hall-Petch effect, for grain size domain up to 10 nm. Mortazavi et al. also showed results similar to those of Sha et al. We suspect that the main difference of these two inconsistent results is due to the different modeling. The modeling of polycrystalline graphene with regular size and (hexagonal) shape shows the pseudo Hall-Petch effect, while the modeling with random size and shape shows the reverse Hall-Petch effect. Therefore, this study is conducted to confirm that different modeling is the main reason for the different behavior of tensile strength of the polycrystalline structures. We conducted MD simulations with models derived from the Voronoi tessellation for two types of grain size distributions. One type is grains of relatively similar sizes; the other is grains of random sizes. We found that the pseudo Hall-Petch effect and the reverse Hall-Petch effect of tensile strength were consistently shown for the two different models. We suspect that this result comes from the different crack paths, which are related to the grain patterns in the models.
