Current carbon nanotube (CNT) synthesis methods include the production of ordered, free-standing vertically aligned arrays, the properties of which are partially governed by interactions between adjacent tubes. Using material parameters determined by atomistic methods, here we represent individual CNTs by a simple single degree of freedom (SDOF) “lollipop” model to investigate the formation, me...

Simple kinetic models of carbon nanotube growth have been able to successfully link together many experimental parameters involved in the growth of carbon nanotubes for practical applications including the prediction of growth rates, terminal lengths, number of walls, activation energies, and their dependences on the growth environment. The implications of recent experiments utilizing in situ m...

Based on the continuum mechanics and a multiple-elastic beam model, the nonlinear free vibration of embedded multiwall carbon nanotubes considering intertube radial displacement and the related internal degrees of freedom is investigated. By using the incremental harmonic balanced method, the iterative relationship of nonlinear amplitude and frequency for the single-wall nanotube and double-wal...

Model composites of DNA-wrapped single-wall carbon nanotubes in poly(acrylic acid) are used to evaluate metrics of nanotube dispersion. By varying the pH of the precursor solutions, we introduce a controlled deviation from ideal behavior. On the basis of small-angle neutron scattering, changes in near-infrared fluorescence intensity are strongly correlated with dispersion, while optical absorpt...