Modeling Considerations and Material Properties Evaluation in Analysis of Carbon Nano-Tubes Composite

This article presents a computational modeling approach for predicting the mechanical behavior of polymer carbon nano-tubes (CNTs). The CNT’s interaction with matrix material was modeled using the continuum mechanics theory and finite element approach. The effective mechanical properties of CNTs were then evaluated by using the finite element method (FEM) models. Two different models were constructed. The first model was a two-dimensional (2-D) axisymmetric nano-scale on a cylinder representative volume element (RVE). The second model considers a three-dimensional (3-D) finite element on a square representative volume element. Several numerical examples were carried out to investigate the stress distribution and to demonstrate the load carrying capacities of the CNT. Having known the stress and strain distributions, the material properties of the CNT can be easily calculated from the standard theory of elasticity. The computed results were compared with those obtained from the simple rule of mixture for validity. The results indicate that cylindrical RVEs tend to overestimate the effective Young’s moduli of the CNT-based composites while the obtained results from square RVEs are more reliable.