Mechanical behavior of carbon nanotube yarns with stochastic microstructure obtained by stretching buckypaper

The development of yarns composed primarily from carbon nanotubes (CNTs) has been pursued recently with the intent of transferring to the yarn the exceptional mechanical and transport properties of individual nanotubes. In this work we study the process of yarn formation by dry stretching buckypaper, and the mechanical behavior of the resulting yarns, function of the CNT length and of the state of the CNT assembly before stretching. The analysis is performed using a coarse grained, bead-spring representation for individual CNTs. It begins with a random buckypaper structure composed from CNTs of diameter 13.5 Å. This structure is stretched to form a yarn. This occurs once the stretch ratio becomes larger than a threshold which depends on the CNT length. At the threshold, adhesion stabilizes a highly aligned packing of CNT bundles. Packing defects and pores, reminiscent of the initial structure of the buckypaper, are incorporated in the yarn. The yarn is further tested in uniaxial tension. The defects have little effect on the mechanical behavior of the resulting yarns. However, the behavior depends sensitively on the degree of packing of the CNTs in the sub-bundles forming the yarn. Therefore, the initial structure of the buckypaper has little effect on the performance of the yarn. Increasing the CNT length increases the yarn flow stress and this is associated with the residual tortuosity of the CNTs in the yarn. Decreasing the temperature or increasing the strain rate lead to a small increase of the flow stress. These results have implications for yarn design, which are discussed in the article.