Continuum Mechanics Applied for Studying Instabilities in Nanoparticles

Abstract

Nanoparticles quite often consist of single or multiple layers of 2D materials,like graphene. For instance, carbon nanotubes, carbon crystallites forming the mesostructure of high strength carbon fibers, as well as carbon onions can be treated as structures consisting of multiple layers of graphene, bond together by van der Waals forces and covalent inter-layer bonds. Despite the fact, that these carbon nanoparticles can hardly be considered as continuous systems, their mechanical response can–undercertain limitations–be investigated using continuum mechanics. This chapter presents a review over published work related to models and methods which can be used to study the stability behaviour of nanoparticles by applying continuum mechanics. The determination of effective mechanical properties as well as the limitations of the continuum mechanics approaches are discussed. Some specific applications, in which peculiar phenomena such as the limited size of carbon onions or the shift in neutralaxis of bent carbon fibers are clarified by computational simulations, are describedin more detail.