TENSILE STRENGTH AND FAILURE MODES OF CONTINUOUS CARBON NANOTUBE YARNS FOR STRUCTURAL COMPOSITE APPLICATION

摘要

Carbon nanotubes (CNT) have shown very attractive mechanical properties. Recently, CNT yarns (CNTy) have become commercially available and are becoming a promising choice for composite structures. To gain a fundamental understanding of CNTy mechanical performance, three variations of CNTy were tested at long gauge lengths (100 - 120 mm). The as-received CNTy demonstrated the highest specific tensile strength (0.911 ± 0.137 N/tex), while the CNTy modified to maximize CNT packing showed the lowest specific tensile strength (0.337 ±0.217 N/tex). The results were the fit to 2-parameter Weibull distributions with near 0.99 goodness of fit. This revealed that long-range CNT alignment acted as the key contributor to the tensile strength, while defects influenced the failure mode. The distribution analysis at a 95 % confidence interval of the CNTy tensile properties were conducted for potential engineering applications.