The interlayer shear effect on graphene multilayer resonators

Graphene nanostrips with single or few layers can be used as bending resonators with extremely high sensitivity to environmental changes. In this paper we report molecular dynamics (MD) simulation results on the fundamental and secondary resonant frequencies f of cantilever graphene nanostrips with different layer number n and different nanostrip length L. The results deviate significantly from the prediction of not only the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory (f proportional to nL(-2)), but also the Timoshenko's model. Since graphene nanostrips have extremely high intralayer Young's modulus and ultralow interlayer shear modulus, we propose a multibeam shear model (MBSM) that neglects the intralayer stretch but accounts for the interlayer shear. The MBSM prediction of the fundamental and secondary resonant frequencies f can be well expressed in the form f-f(mono)proportional to [(n-1)/n]L-b(-2(1-b)), where f(mono) denotes the corresponding resonant frequency as the layer number is 1, with b=0.61 and 0.77 for the fundamental and secondary resonant modes. Without any additional parameters fitting, the prediction from MBSM agrees excellently with the MD simulation results. The model is thus of importance for designing multilayer graphene nanostrips based applications, such as resonators, sensors and actuators, where interlayer shear has apparent impacts on the mechanical deformation, vibration and energy dissipation processes therein. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.