Prediction of elastic properties of carbon nanotube reinforced composites

By Ning Hu, Hisao Fukunaga, C. Lu, M. Kameyama, B. Yan. Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 2004

176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, the macroscopic elastic properties of carbon nanotube reinforced composites are evaluated through analysing the elastic deformation of a representative volume element (RVE) under various loading conditions. This RVE contains three components, i.e. a carbon nanotube, a transition layer between the nanotube and polymer matrix and an outer polymer matrix body. First, based on the force field theory of molecular mechanics and computational structural mechanics, an equivalent beam model is constructed to model the carbon nanotube effectively. The explicit relationships between the material properties of the equivalent beam element and the force constants have been set-up. Second, to describe the interaction between the nanotube and the outer polymer matrix at the level of atoms, the molecular mechanics and molecular dynamics computations have been performed to obtain the thickness and material properties of the transition layer. Moreover, an efficient three-dimensional eight-noded brick finite element is employed to model the transition layer and the outer polymer matrix. The macroscopic behaviours of the RVE can then be evaluated through the traditional finite element method. In the numerical simulations, the influences of various important factors, such as the stiffness of transition layer and geometry of RVE, on the final macroscopic material properties of composites have been investigated in detail.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Materials Chemistry, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/003a0eb1866589277180c93fcdae00b6ecdf67f5

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomedical Engineering

1. Ning Hu
2. Yanping Cao
3. Toshiaki Natsuki
4. Hisao Fukunaga
5. Hui‐Shen Shen
6. Xi-Qiao Feng
7. Jie Yang

In Materials Chemistry

1. Yaolu Liu
2. Q. Ni
3. Toshiaki Natsuki
4. Jin-Xing Shi
5. Xiao-Wen Lei
6. Hisao Fukunaga
7. Ning Hu
8. Jinhua Li

In Pollution

1. Hui‐Shen Shen
2. Xi-Qiao Feng

Citations in the corpus

• Surface effects on the vibrational frequency of double-walled carbon nanotubes using the nonlocal Timoshenko beam model (2012, background): “Most of the studies have treated nanowires and nanotubes as simple Euler beams, which neglects the effects of transverse shear deformation and rotary inertia [16–20].”
• Piezoresistive Strain Sensors Made from Carbon Nanotubes Based Polymer Nanocomposites (2011, background): “Besides applications of a single CNT in various nanoelectronic applications, such as probes [1] or oscillators [2], CNTs are also ideal structural components candidates in various composites and functional composites due to their mechanical reinforcement effects [3-7].”
• Micromechanics prediction of the effective elastic moduli of graphene sheet-reinforced polymer nanocomposites (2010, methodology): “Hu et al [14] integrated molecular mechanics, computational structure mechanics and molecular dynamics computations with a finite element method to tackle the macroscopic elastic properties of CNT-reinforced composites, and further expanded the scope of their research to the electrical properties [1”
• Nonlinear bending of functionally graded carbon nanotube-reinforced composite plates in thermal environments (2009, background): “Most studies on carbon nanotube-reinforced composites (CNTRCs) have focused on their material properties [5–10].”