Bending and buckling of nanowires including the effects of surface stress and nonlocal elasticity

This paper presents the bending deformation due to uniformly distributed load and buckling load of nanowires with various boundary conditions including surface stress and nonlocal elasticity effects. The analytical solutions for static displacement and buckling load of nanowires are derived and compared with those of numerical results obtained by the finite element method. The results indicate that the influences of surface stress and nonlocal elasticity affects directly both the displacement and buckling load. The effect of surface stress is to increase the stiffness of nanowires. Therefore, the nanowires for all boundary conditions show stiffer behavior in comparison with classical Euler beam. The effect of nonlocal elasticity can result in either stiffer or softer behaviors of nanowires depending on the boundary conditions. In case of buckling loads, the surface stress increases the buckling load significantly while the nonlocal elasticity is affected slightly. For nanowires including both effects, the results show that the buckling load is between one of the nanowires with surface stress and the one with nonlocal elasticity.

► A model of nanowires considering effects of surface stress and nonlocal elasticity is presented.
► Static deformation of nanowires due to uniformly distributed load is investigated.
► Buckling load due to compressive force is also determined.
► Analytical solutions are derived and verified numerically using the finite element method.