Analysis of elastic properties of carbon nanotube reinforced nanocomposites with pinhole defects

Due to their unique molecular structure, carbon nanotubes exhibit outstanding properties. They are regarded as ideal reinforcements of composites. In this paper, the effects of pinhole defects on mechanical properties are investigated for wavy carbon nanotubes based nanocomposites using 3-D Representative Volume Element with long carbon nanotubes. The carbon nanotubes are modeled as continuum hollow cylindrical shape elastic material with pinholes, having some curvature in its shape. These defects are considered on the single walled carbon nanotubes. The mechanical properties like Young’s modulus of elasticity are evaluated for various values of waviness index, as well as type and number of pinhole defects. The effects of interactions between both defects as well as their influence on the nanocomposites are studied under an axial loading condition. Numerical equations are used to extract the effective material properties for the different geometries of Representative Volume Elements with non-defective carbon nanotubes. The finite element method results obtained for non-defective carbon nanotubes are consistent with analytical results for cylindrical Representative Volume Elements, which validate the proposed model. It is observed that the presence of pinhole defects as well as waviness, can significantly reduces the effective reinforcement, when compared with nanotubes without pinhole defects and this reinforcement decreases with the increase of the number of pinhole defects.