Enhanced interfacial strength of graphene reinforced aluminum composites via X (Cu, Ni, Ti)-coating: Molecular-dynamics insights

Abstract The poor interface bonding between graphene and aluminum is one of the main challenges which could impede wider application of graphene/Al composites. Coating metals on graphene layer could be an effective method to solve this problem. In this research, the pullout processes and uniaxial tensile tests were performed by using molecular dynamics (MD) simulation method to explore how the coating metals, such as Ni, Cu and Ti, affect the interfacial strength between C-Al bonds and the mechanical properties of nanocomposites, respectively. The results reveal that Ni is the most powerful coating metal among these three candidates in enhancing interfacial strength since it has the highest value of pullout force. Also, it leads to an enhancement of 26.39% in the Young’s modulus when compared with the one without coating treatment. As for the impact of various amounts of Ni coating, it is demonstrated that the interfacial bonding can be enhanced up to 87.65%, 92.67%, 111.27% and 145.34% with the percentage of Ni coating was 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%, respectively. In terms of the mechanical property, the various percentage of Ni has little impact on Young’s modulus while the value of tensile strength falls slightly, from 58.94 GPa to 51.88 GPa.