Modelling of the interfacial damping due to nanotube agglomerations in nanocomposites

Nanocomposites reinforced with carbon nanotube fibers exhibit greater stiffness, strength and damping properties in comparison to conventional composites reinforced with carbon/glass fibers. Consequently, most of the nanocomposite research is focused in understanding the dynamic characteristics, which are highly useful in applications such as vibration control and energy harvesting. It has been observed that those nanocomposites show better stiffness when the geometry of nanotubes is straight as compared to curvilinear although nanotube agglomeration may exist. In this work the damping behavior of the nanocomposite is characterized in terms of loss factor under the presence of nanotube agglomerations. A micro stick-slip damping model is used to compute the damping properties of the nanocomposites with multiwall carbon nanotubes. The present formulation considers the slippage between the interface of the matrix and the nanotubes as well as the slippage between the interlayers in the nanotubes. The nanotube agglomerations model is also presented. Results are computed based on the loss factor expressed in terms of strain amplitude and nanotube agglomerations. The results show that although – among the various factors such as the material properties (moduli of nanotubes and polymer matrix) and the geometric properties (number of nanotubes, volume fraction of nanotubes, and critical interfacial shear stresses), the agglomeration of nanotubes significantly influences the damping properties of the nanocomposites. Therefore the full potential of nanocomposites to be used for damping applications needs to be analyzed under the influence of nanotube agglomerations.