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

Abstract

It has been observed that carbon nanotubes (CNT) have a measurable inherent piezoresistive e ect, 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 e ect 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 coe cients needed for the piezoresistive response of the macroscale nanocomposites to be comparable with experimental data in the literature if inherent piezoresistive e ect of CNTs is the only driving force for the piezoresistive response of the macroscale nanocomposites.