Phase transformation of stress-induced zinc oxide nanobelts using molecular dynamics

► In this study we investigated in detail the mechanical response under tensile loading of a Zn-O belt using MD. ► We studied the tensile loading to create reconstruction, observed the phase transformation and we found that the wurtzite (WZ) transform into a body-centered-terragonal lattice with a six-atom ring BCT-6 at 300 K. ► In this study we found that the failure stresses were about 6 ∼ 7.5 GPa at substrate temperatures of 300 ∼ 900 K