SciTech Daily December 29, 2021
By combining atomistic models with kinetic Monte Carlo simulations, researchers at Rice University have shown that a pristine carbon nanotube under ambient working conditions is essentially indefatigable accumulating no structural memory of prior load; over time, it probabilistically breaks, abruptly. However, by using coarse-grained modeling they demonstrated that any practical assemblies of nanotubes, e.g., bundles and fibers, display a clear gradual strength degradation in cyclic tensile loading due to recurrence and ratchet-up of slip at the tube-tube interfaces, not occurring under static load even of equal amplitude. 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…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
…cyclic loading of nanotube fibers leads to strain ratcheting that can eventually lead to the failure of the fiber. Credit: Nitant Gupta and Evgeni Penev/Yakobson Research Group