Computational Micromechanics of Clustering and Interphase Effects in Carbon Nanotube Composites

Characterizing elastic properties of carbon nanotubes/polyimide nanocomposites using multi-scale simulation

“…Hammerand et al [9] conducted micromechanical analysis on the CNT nanocomposites by introducing an interphase layer between the CNTs and the matrix to simulate the imperfect load transfer or imperfect bonding. The dimension of the interphase was determined such that the interphase has the same volume fraction as the CNTs.…”

“…Because the dimensions of the CNTs are within nanoscale while the polymer itself is often regarded as a bulk matrix material in composites, it becomes a challenging issue to properly characterize the properties of the CNT/polymer hybrids using the conventional continuum theory. In the past decade, the mechanical properties of CNT-reinforced nanocomposites have been modeled by many researchers using the molecular dynamics (MD) simulation [3][4][5], continuum mechanics [6][7][8], and multi-scale simulation [9,10].…”

3D RVE Models Able to Capture and Quantify the Dispersion, Agglomeration, and Orientation State of CNT in CNT/PP Nanocomposites

“…The element used for all phases is a 3D structural brick element namely, SOLID185, which is an eight-node quadratic element and has three degrees of freedom per node. It is assumed that the bonding at the interface is perfect (Hammeranda et al, 2007;Zhang et al, 2007;Kumar et al, 2010), and all the phases are isotropic, linear elastic, and homogeneous. A FEA parametric study is used to determine the optimum element size (mesh density) that leads to a fully converged solution with minimum computational time.…”

Multiscale modeling of functionalized interface effects on the effective elastic material properties of CNT–polyethylene nanocomposites

“…Hence, there is growing interest in and reliance on computational materials science techniques to study the interface between the CNTs and polymer matrix using atomistic simulation and/or continuum models [33,9,11]. Seidel and Lagoudas [29] and Hammerand et al [14] have studied and discussed the influence of the alignment and the clustering as well as the presence of an interphase region on the effective elastic properties of carbon nanotube reinforced composites using both finite element method (FEM) and composite cylinders model (CCM) micromechanics techniques. Wagner [33] estimated the ISS by applying an expanded form of the KellyTyson model to explore the load transfer ability of the interface between SWCNTs and polymer matrix in the nanocomposites.…”