Effect of bending instabilities on the measurements of mechanical properties of multiwalled carbon nanotubes

Abstract

It has been reported that a multiwalled carbon nanotube in bending may exhibit an unusal elastic mode that corresponds to the wavelike distortion or ripple along the inner arc of the bent nanotube, called the rippling mode, which cannot be predicted by the linear theories. The present analysis shows that the rippling mode is permissible by the theory for highly anisotropic elastic materials of finite deformation and that the dependence of the bending moment upon the bending curvature can be well approximated by a bilinear relation, in which the transition from one linear branch to the other corresponds to the emergence of the rippling mode. With this bilinear relation, the authors show that ..