ECCM15 - 15TH EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON COMPOSITE MATERIALS
Venice, Italy, 24-28 June 2012

[ECCM15-914]

Computational Micromechanics Modeling of Piezoresistivity of Carbon Nanotube Polymer Nanocomposites

Xiang Ren and Gary D. Seidel
AOE Department, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, 24061, USA

Keywords: Nanocomposites, Piezoresistivity, Micromechanics, FEM.

It has been observed that carbon nanotubes (CNT) have a measurable inherent piezoresistive effect, that is to say that changes in carbon nanotube strain can induce changes in its resistivity, which may lead to observable macroscale piezoresistive response of nanocomposites. In this paper, the focus is on modeling the effect of inherent piezoresistivity of carbon nanotubes on the nanocomposites piezoresistive behavior by using computational micromechanics techniques based on finite element analysis. The computational results show the magnitude of the piezoresistive coefficients needed for the piezoresistive response of the macroscale nanocomposites to be comparable with experimental data in the literature if inherent piezoresistive effect of CNTs is the only driving force for the piezoresistive response of the macroscale nanocomposites.