Mechanical properties of nanoporous graphene membrane

Nanoporous graphene holds great promise in the application of filtration such as seawater desalination, gas separation, and ionic channels. In this paper, we study the mechanical properties of nanoporous graphene with different size, shape, and density of nanopore. The strength decreases as the size and porosity of the nanopore increases. However, the rough edges of the nanopore has significant influence to the strength where the blunt tip perpendicular to the loading direction has higher strength. The effective tensile modulus is only determined by porosity of the nanopore as ΔE ∼ -p^0.64, while the strength is determined by the size, shape, and porosity of the nanopore, for the same type of nanopore the strength scales with the porosity as Δσ_s ∼ -p. In contrast, the effective fracture strain increases as porosity increases for small and moderate porosities. The work is a first study of the relation between mechanical properties and porosity of nanoporous graphene and is helpful to the design of high performance nanoporous graphene membrane.