No Arabic abstract
Super-compressible foam-like carbon nanotube films have been reported to exhibit highly nonlinear viscoelastic behaviour in compression similar to soft tissue. Their unique combination of light weight and exceptional electrical, thermal and mechanical properties have helped identify them as viable building blocks for more complex nanosystems and as stand-alone structures for a variety of different applications. In the as-grown state, their mechanical performance is limited by the weak adhesion between the tubes, controlled by the van der Waals forces, and the substrate allowing the forests to split easily and to have low resistance in shear. Under axial compression loading carbon nanotubes have demonstrated bending, buckling8 and fracture9 (or a combination of the above) depending on the loading conditions and on the number of loading cycles. In this work, we partially anchor dense vertically aligned foam-like forests of carbon nanotubes on a thin, flexible polymer layer to provide structural stability, and report the mechanical response of such systems as a function of the strain rate. We test the sample under quasi-static indentation loading and under impact loading and report a variable nonlinear response and different elastic recovery with varying strain rates. A Bauschinger-like effect is observed at very low strain rates while buckling and the formation of permanent defects in the tube structure is reported at very high strain rates. Using high-resolution transmission microscopy
New forms of carbon-based materials have received great attention, and the developed materials have found many applications in nanotechnology. Interesting novel carbon structures include the carbon peapods, which are comprised of fullerenes encapsulated within carbon nanotubes. Peapod-like nanostructures have been successfully synthesized, and have been used in optical modulation devices, transistors, solar cells, and in other devices. However, the mechanical properties of these structures are not completely elucidated. In this work, we investigated, using fully atomistic molecular dynamics simulations, the deformation of carbon peapods under high-strain rate conditions, which are achieved by shooting the peapods at ultrasonic velocities against a rigid substrate. Our results show that carbon peapods experience large deformation at impact, and undergo multiple fracture pathways, depending primarily on the relative orientation between the peapod and the substrate, and the impact velocity. Observed outcomes include fullerene ejection, carbon nanotube fracture, fullerene, and nanotube coalescence, as well as the formation of amorphous carbon structures.
We use elastomeric polydimethylsiloxane substrates to strain single-walled carbon nanotubes and modulate their electronic properties, with the aim of developing flexible materials that can sense local strain. We demonstrate micron-scale nanotube devices that can be cycled repeatedly through strains as high as 20% while providing reproducible local strain transduction by via the device resistance. We also compress individual nanotubes, and find they undergo an undulatory distortion with a characteristic spatial period of 100-200 nm. The observed period can be understood by the mechanical properties of nanotubes and the substrate in conjunction with continuum elasticity theory. These could potentially be used to create superlattices within individual nanotubes, enabling novel devices and applications.
We find that the optical properties of carbon nanotubes reflect remarkably strong effects of exciton-phonon coupling. Tight-binding calculations show that a significant fraction of the spectral weight of the absorption peak is transferred to a distinct exciton+phonon sideband, which is peaked at around 200 meV above the main absorption peak. This sideband provides a distinctive signature of the excitonic character of the optical transition. The exciton-phonon coupling is reflected in a dynamical structural distortion, which contributes a binding energy of up to 100 meV. The distortion is surprisingly long-ranged, and is strongly dependent on chirality.
Irradiation-induced vacancy evolution in face-centered cubic (FCC) Ni under mechanical strains was studied using molecular dynamics simulations. Applied hydrostatic strain led to different stable forms of vacancy clusters, i.e., voids under strain >= +2% and stacking fault tetrahedras (SFTs) under strain <= 0. Direct transitions between SFT and void revealed that increasing strain magnitude facilitated the thermodynamic stability and dynamical evolution. The estimated free energy difference could well validate the dynamical simulations results by accounting for entropic contribution, which was revealed to play an important role in the thermodynamic stability of vacancy clusters in FCC Ni.
We report on the nano-electron beam assisted fabrication of atomically sharp iron-based tips and on the creation of a nano-soldering iron for nano-interconnects using Fe-filled multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs). High energy electron beam machining has been proven a powerful tool to modify desired nanostructures for technological applications and to form molecular junctions and interconnections between carbon nanotubes. Recent studies showed the high degree of complexity in the creation of direct interconnections between multiwalled and CNTs having dissimilar diameters. Our technique allows for carving a MWCNT into a nanosoldering iron that was demonstrated capable of joining two separated halves of a tube. This approach could easily be extended to the interconnection of two largely dissimilar CNTs, between a CNT and a nanowire or between two nanowires.