53rd AIAA/ASME/ASCE/AHS/ASC Structures, Structural Dynamics and Materials Conference
23 - 26 April 2012, Honolulu, Hawaii

AIAA 2012-1496

Computational Micromechanics Modeling of Axial Piezoresistivity of Polymer Nanocomposites with Well Dispersed and Aligned Carbon Nanotubes

Xiang Ren and G.D. Seidel
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, 24061-0203, USA

It has been observed that carbon nanotubes (CNT) have a measurable inherent piezore- sistive eect, 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 nanocom- posites. In this paper, the focus is on modeling the eect of inherent piezoresistivity of carbon nanotubes on the nanocomposites piezoresistive behavior by using computational micromechanics techniques based on nite element analysis. The computational results show the magnitude of the piezoresistive coecients needed for the piezoresistive response of the macroscale nanocomposites to be comparable with experimental data in the litera- ture if inherent piezoresistive eect of CNTs is the only driving force for the piezoresistive response of the macroscale nanocomposites.