2012 SPIE Smart Structures/NDE and Health Monitoring Conference
11-15 March 2012, San Diego, California

[8342-49]

Computational Modeling of Piezoresistivity of Carbon Nanotube Polymer Nanocomposites

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 piezoresistive 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 nanocomposites. 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 literature if inherent piezoresistive eect of CNTs is the only driving force for the piezoresistive response of the macroscale nanocomposites.