English

Atomistic Simulations of Nanotube Fracture

Atomic and Molecular Clusters 2009-11-07 v1

Abstract

The fracture of carbon nanotubes is studied by atomistic simulations. The fracture behavior is found to be almost independent of the separation energy and to depend primarily on the inflection point in the interatomic potential. The rangle of fracture strians compares well with experimental results, but predicted range of fracture stresses is marketly higher than observed. Various plausible small-scale defects do not suffice to bring the failure stresses into agreement with available experimental results. As in the experiments, the fracture of carbon nanotubes is predicted to be brittle. The results show moderate dependence of fracture strength on chirality.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.physics/0203086,
  title  = {Atomistic Simulations of Nanotube Fracture},
  author = {T. Belytschko and S. P. Xiao and G. C. Schatz and R. Ruoff},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:physics/0203086},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

12 pages, PDF, submitted to Phy. Rev. B