An investigation into the influence of thermal loading and surface effects on mechanical characteristics of nanotubes

Abstract

In this paper the differential transformation method (DTM) is utilized for vibration and buckling analysis of nanotubes in thermal environment while considering the coupled surface and nonlocal effects. The Eringen`s nonlocal elasticity theory takes into account the effect of small size while the Gurtin-Murdoch model is used to incorporate the surface effects (SE). The derived governing differential equations are solved by DTM which demonstrated to have high precision and computational efficiency in the vibration analysis of nanobeams. The detailed mathematical derivations are presented and numerical investigations are performed while the emphasis is placed on investigating the effect of thermal loading, small scale and surface effects, mode number, thickness ratio and boundary conditions on the normalized natural frequencies and critical buckling loads of the nanobeams in detail. The results show that the surface effects lead to an increase in natural frequency and critical buckling load of nanotubes. It is explicitly shown that the vibration and buckling of a nanotube is significantly influenced by these effects and the influence of thermal loadings and nonlocal effects are minimal.