Abstract
It was discovered that a sudden jump of the output torque moment from a rotation transmission nanosystem made from carbon nanotubes (CNTs) occurred when decreasing the system temperature. In the nanosystem from coaxial-layout CNTs, the motor with specified rotational frequency (ωM) can drive the inner tube (rotor) to rotate in the outer tubes. When the axial gap between the motor and the rotor was fixed, the friction between their neighbor edges was stronger at a lower temperature. Especially at temperatures below 100 K, the friction-induced driving torque increases with ωM. When the rotor was subjected to an external resistant torque moment (Mr), it could not rotate opposite to the motor even if it deformed heavily. Combining molecular dynamics simulations with the bi-sectioning algorithm, the critical value of Mr was obtained. Under the critical torque moment, the rotor stopped rotating. Accordingly, a transmission nanosystem can be designed to provide a strong torque moment via interface friction at low temperature.
Highlights
Carbon materials with wide application have played an important role in material interface projects for over half a century [1]
Since specific carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and graphene can be fabricated [2,3,4,5,6,7], low dimensional materials start to enter into the public eye due to their excellent physical properties
We first measured the value of rotation transmission ratio, i.e., RTran, as shown in Figure 1, of the zigzag nanosystem with Mr = 0 eV at different conditions
Summary
Carbon materials with wide application have played an important role in material interface projects for over half a century [1]. Each carbon atom has an antibonding electron, which introduces two particular properties, i.e., excellent electrical conductivity [18,19] and superlubrication [4,7,20,21] between two neighbor tubes or sheets Owing to both extremely high in-plane/shell strength and modulus and extremely low inter-plane/shell friction, CNTs and graphene are popular in developing nanodevices, e.g., oscillator [22,23,24,25,26,27,28], nanomotor [29,30,31], nanobearing [32], nanoresonator [33,34,35,36]
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