Mechanics of carbon nanotubes

(Nanowerk News) The new still emerging field of nanomechanics is, probably, one of the simplest parts in the conceptual foundation of nanoscale sciences and nanotechnology.
A first nationally distributed short course "Mechanics of Carbon Nanotubes" has been presented at the Annual ASME Congress in 2001 by Dr. Vasyl Michael Harik, then a Senior Staff Scientist at the ICASE Institute at the NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA.
In 2011, exactly ten years after the first presentation of that short course, a new book with the same title "Mechanics of Carbon Nanotubes" has been published by a 2004 NASA spin-off, Nanodesigns Consulting of Newark, DE.
This book is written for a wide audience ranging from the college students, the college-educated audience and graduate students to academic or industrial researchers, R&D engineers and nanotechnology developers.
Parts of this book are based on the fundamental research work on the basic methods for nanoscale mechanics during the initial stages of the establishment of Nanotechnology Programs at the NASA Langley Research Center (Hampton, Virginia) and the university-based ICASE Institute (NASA Langley Research Center) between 2000 and 2004. Some of the material presented in this book is connected to the work on multifunctional composites sponsored by the Princeton-based URETI Institute for the Bio-inspired Nanostructured Materials and the University Space Research Association (USRA) between 2003 and the end of 2006. This book begins with a few key examples that illustrate a variety of novel nanotechnology applications such as nanotube-based sensors and resonators, MEMS and NEMS devices, AFM probes, nanotube anchoring and embedding, nanotube-modified polymers and multifunctional membranes including new types of nanocomposite materials.
The basic concepts needed to understand the key features in the design and development of various nanoscale devices are presented later in a clear manner allowing to fully comprehend the complexity and the fundamental atomistic nature of different nanoscale phenomena. New nanoscale laws (e.g., a nanoscale analog of the Newton s friction law), novel nanoscale effects (e.g., a nanoscale analog of the Pauli principle, etc.), classification of carbon nanotubes into four classes of lattice shells, lattice registry matrices and fundamental relations for the nanoscale homogenization and other analysis methods.
Source: Nanodesigns Consulting