Modeling of Vertically Aligned Carbon Nanotube Composites for Vibration Damping Available to Purchase

High density aligned multi-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and the CNT/epoxy composite are fabricated. To predict the energy dissipation in composites with vertically aligned multi-walled CNTs, a structural damping model of composite unit cell composed of resin, sheath and nanotube is developed. In this paper, the resin is described as viscoelastic material using Maxwell model. The CNT/epoxy composite is modeled based on the “stick-slip” mechanism, to describe the load transfer behavior between the CNT and its sheath. In order to further study the damping mechanism of the CNT composite, key parameters, such as length, center-to-center distance and critical stress of CNTs that are expected to affect the composite damping performances are studied. The simulation results show that loss factor of the CNT composite with varying parameters is sensitive to the applied stress.