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An elastic model for bioinspired design of carbon nanotube bundles

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Abstract

Collagen fibers provide a good example of making strong micro- or mesoscale fibers from nanoscale tropocollagen molecules through a staggered and cross-linked organization in a bottom-up manner. Mimicking the architectural features of collagen fibers has been shown to be a promising approach to develop carbon nanotube (CNT) fibers of high performance. In the present work, an elastic model is developed to describe the load transfer and failure propagation within the bioinspired CNT bundles, and to establish the relations of the mechanical properties of the bundles with a number of geometrical and physical parameters such as the CNT aspect ratio and longitudinal gap, interface cross-link density, and the functionalization-induced degradation in CNTs, etc. With the model, the stress distributions along the CNT–CNT interface as well as in every individual CNT are well captured, and the failure propagation along the interface and its effects on the mechanical properties of the CNT bundles are predicted. The work may provide useful guidelines for the design of novel CNT fibers in practice.

Graphical Abstract

Mimicking the staggered and cross-linked features of collagen fibril structure has been shown to be a promising approach to develop carbon nanotube (CNT) fibers of high performance. In this work, an elastic model is developed to describe the load transfer and failure propagation within the collagen-inspired CNT bundles. With the model, the relations of the mechanical properties of the bundles with a number of geometrical and physical parameters are established, two failure modes and their transition are predicted, and optimal interface design to eliminate interface stress concentration are discussed.

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Acknowledgments

Zuoqi Zhang and Yongwei Zhang acknowledge the support from IHPC, A*STAR. The work is partially supported by the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2014M562055).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Civil Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, Hubei, China

    Xiaoyu Sun & Yuanjie Xu

  2. Institute of High Performance Computing, A*STAR, Singapore, 138632, Singapore

    Zuoqi Zhang & Yongwei Zhang

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  1. Xiaoyu Sun
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  2. Zuoqi Zhang
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  4. Yongwei Zhang
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Correspondence to Zuoqi Zhang.

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Sun, X., Zhang, Z., Xu, Y. et al. An elastic model for bioinspired design of carbon nanotube bundles. Acta Mech Sin 31, 205–215 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10409-015-0403-z

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