Modeling of Carbon Nanotubes, Graphene and Their Composites

A large part of the research currently being conducted in the fields of materials science and engineering mechanics is devoted to carbon nanotubes and their applications. In this process, modeling is a very attractive investigation tool due to the difficulties in manufacturing and testing of nanomaterials. Continuum modeling offers significant advantages over atomistic modeling. Furthermore, the lack of accuracy in continuum methods can be overtaken by incorporating input data either from experiments or atomistic methods. This book reviews the recent progress in continuum modeling of carbon nanotubes and their composites. The advantages and disadvantages of continuum methods over atomistic methods are comprehensively discussed. Numerical models, mainly based on the finite element method, as well as analytical models are presented in a comparative way starting from the simulation of isolated pristine and defected nanotubes and proceeding to nanotube-based composites. The ability of continuum methods to bridge different scales is emphasized. Recommendations for future research are given by focusing on what still continuum methods have to learn from the nano-scale. The scope of the book is to provide current knowledge aiming to support researchers entering the scientific area of carbon nanotubes to choose the appropriate modeling tool for accomplishing their study and place their efforts to further improve continuum methods.

Dr Konstantinos Tserpes is a Research Associate in the National Technical University of Athens and a Lecturer in Harokopio University of Athens. He is a graduate of the Computer Engineering and Informatics department of the University of Patras, holding a PhD in the area of Service Oriented Architectures with a focus on quality aspects from the school of Electrical and Computer Engineering of NTUA and a Master’s degree from the same School. His research interests encompass distributed and heterogeneous systems and software and service engineering. As such, he has been involved in several EU and National funded projects (e.g. BEinGRID, NextGRID, EchoGRID, CHALLENGERS, ALADDIN, HellasGRID, USNES) leading research for solving issues related to interoperability, fault tolerance, scalability and extensibility in application domains such as multimedia, e-governance, post-production, finance, e-health and others. Currently he is the technical manager of the +Spaces and SocIoS FP7 ICT projects.Dr Nuno Silvestre is an associate professor at the ‘Instituto Superior Tecnico’, Lissabon, Portugal. His research interests include Nano-Mechanics, Simulation at Nano-Scale, Behaviour of Thin-Walled Structures, Non-Linear Mechanics and Numerical Analysis of Structures, Structural Stability and Dynamics, and Analysis and Design of Steel and FRP Composite Structures. He has more than 50 journal publications to his name as well as a book chapter, and he received many awards. He is also an esteemed member of many scientific and management committees, and editorial boards, and also a referee to more than 20 journals.He is currently involved in several projects, among which “Modeling and Analysis of Nano-Structures: Carbon Nanotubes and Nano-Composite Materials”.