Mechanical properties of knitted carbon nanotube sheet: A molecular dynamics study

ZW Zhuang and JY Chang and JD Fan and M Li and T Dumitrica and H Xu, DIAMOND AND RELATED MATERIALS, 152, 112005 (2025).

DOI: 10.1016/j.diamond.2025.112005

Bottom-up design of carbon nanotube (CNT) structures is a promising approach of transferring the excellent mechanical properties of CNTs to CNT networks. In this paper, we propose knitted ultrathin CNT sheets, which are demonstrated to be stable structure with large entanglement and isotropic mechanical properties. Molecular dynamics simulations were carried out to study the tensile properties of the knitted structures. The specific strength and specific modulus of the knitted CNT sheets reach 26GPa/(g/cm3) and 187GPa/(g/cm3) respectively. In addition, we investigated the fracture mechanism and the effects of vacancies. Fracture initiates from the formation of a pentagon-heptagon pair near the vacancy. The number of single vacancies and orientation of double vacancies affect the fracture strain in different manners. This work is a useful reference for designing novel CNT structures and studying the load transfer between CNTs.

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