Extremely compliant and highly stretchable patterned graphene

Graphene is intrinsically ultra-stiff in its plane. Its huge mechanical mismatch when interfacing with ultra-compliant biological tissues and elastomers (7-9 orders of magnitude difference in stiffness) poses significant challenge in its application to functional devices such as epidermal electronics and sensing prosthesis. We offer a feasible and promising solution to this significant challenge by suitably patterning graphene into a nanomesh. Through systematic coarse-grained simulations, we show that graphene nanomesh can be made extremely compliant with nearly zero stiffness up to about 20% elongation and then remain highly compliant up to about 50% elongation. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.