Rice scientists calculate how carbon nanotubes and their fibers experience fatigue

Up here in the macro world, we all feel fatigue now and then. It’s the same for bundles of carbon nanotubes, no matter how perfect their individual components are.

A Rice University study calculates how strains and stresses affect both “perfect” nanotubes and those assembled into fibers and found that while fibers under cyclic loads can fail over time, the tubes themselves may remain perfect. How long the tubes or their fibers sustain their mechanical environment can determine their practicality for applications.

That made the study, which appears in Science Advances, important to Rice materials theorist Boris Yakobson,graduate student Nitant Gupta and assistant research professor Evgeni Penev of Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering. They quantified the effects of cyclic stress on nanotubes using state-of-the-art simulation techniques like a kinetic Monte Carlo method. They hope to give researchers and industry a way to predict how long nanotube fibers or other assemblies can be expected to last under given conditions.

– See more at Rice News