Roham Rafiee

Abstract:

Predicting mechanical properties of CNT-based nanocomposites as the main concern of this talk plays an important role in their development process and can pave the road toward their industrial application. Micromechanics rules cannot be directly applied to CNT reinforced polymer due to the invalid basic assumption. Thus, a full range multi-scale modeling technique is developed to estimate Young’s modulus and Poisson’s ratio of CNT reinforced polymer to overcome this shortcoming. Covering all involved scales of Nano, Micro, Meso and Macro, the developed modeling consists of two different phases as top-down scanning and bottom-up modeling. At the first stage, the material region will be scanned from the macro level downward to the nano scale. Effective parameters associated with each and every scale will be identified through this scanning procedure. Taking into account identified effective parameters of each specific scale, suitable representative volume elements (RVE) will be defined for each and every scale, separately. In the second stage of the modeling procedure, a hierarchical multi-scale modeling approach is developed. This modeling strategy will analyze the material at each scale and obtained results are fed to the upper scale as input information. Due to induced uncertainties during the processing of CNT reinforced polymer, the developed modeling technique is implemented stochastically to capture involved random parameters. The novelty of the current research is twofold: developing a full-range multi-scale technique to consider effective parameters of all scales and full stochastic implementation of integrated modeling procedures. It has been revealed that the developed modeling procedure provides a clear insight to the properties of CNT reinforced polymer and it is a very efficient tool for predicting mechanical behavior of CNT-based nanocomposites.