Effect of surface roughness on adhesion of graphene membranes Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • To integrate graphene in functional devices, it is essential to understand interfacial adhesion between graphene and surrounding materials for mechanical support and encapsulation. In complement with recent efforts aiming to measure the adhesion energy experimentally, we present a theoretical model to predict how the surface roughness may affect the adhesion between graphene membranes and their substrates. It is found that the bending modulus, which increases drastically from monolayer to multilayered graphene, plays an important role in the transition from conformal to non-conformal morphology of the graphene membranes on a corrugated surface. As such, the work of adhesion drops considerably from monolayer to bilayer graphene, in good agreement with recent measurements. Moreover, the theoretical results suggest that tunable adhesion of graphene can be achieved by controlling the surface roughness of the substrate.

published proceedings

  • Journal of Physics D

altmetric score

  • 2.7

author list (cited authors)

  • Gao, W., & Huang, R.

citation count

  • 106

complete list of authors

  • Gao, Wei||Huang, Rui

publication date

  • November 2011