Competing elastic and adhesive interactions govern deformation behaviors of aligned carbon nanotube arrays

XD Yang and PF He and HJ Gao, APPLIED PHYSICS LETTERS, 101, 053105 (2012).

DOI: 10.1063/1.4739414

Recent experiments have revealed diverse and sometimes conflicting deformation behaviors of vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays under compression, but a thorough understanding of this phenomenon is still elusive. Here, we employ a mesoscale bead-spring model to demonstrate that the seemingly complex deformation behaviors of carbon nanotube arrays can be understood from competing elastic and adhesive interactions at the micro scale. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.47394141