Diamond Needles Actuating Triple-Walled Carbon Nanotube to Rotate via Thermal Vibration-Induced Collision.

Hui Li,Jiao Shi,Aiqin Wang,Gao Cheng,Yongjian Liu

doi:10.3390/ijms20051140

Abstract

A rotary nanomotor is an essential component of a nanomachine. In the present study, a rotary nanomotor from wedged diamonds and triple-walled nanotubes was proposed with the consideration of boundary effect. The outer tubes and mid-tubes were used as nanobearing to constrain the inner tube. Several wedges of the diamond were placed near the inner tube for driving the inner tube to rotate. At a temperature lower than 300 K, the inner tube as the rotor had a stable rotational frequency (SRF). It is shown that both the rotational direction and the value of SRF of the rotor depended on the temperature and thickness of the diamond wedges. The dependence was investigated via theoretical analysis of the molecular dynamics simulation results. For example, when each diamond wedge had one pair of tip atoms (unsaturated), the rotational direction of the rotor at 100 K was opposite to that at 300 K. At 500 K, the rotating rotor may stop suddenly due to breakage of the diamond needles. Some conclusions are drawn for potential application of such a nanomotor in a nanomachine.

Highlights

Since discovered in 1991 [1], carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have attracted much attention [2,3,4]
Effects of Temperature and Thickness of Diamond on the Rotor’s Rotation Using the approach of molecular dynamics simulation, we obtain the histories of ωR of the rotor constrained by thin stators at different conditions
According to the historical curves of ωR shown in 0, we know that the rotor has a stable rotational frequency (SRF) after no more than 4 ns at 100 K (0a)

Summary

Introduction

Since discovered in 1991 [1], carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have attracted much attention [2,3,4]. Owing to two excellent mechanical features, carbon nanotubes (CNT) are popular in the design of dynamic nanodevices, e.g., oscillators [2,3,5,6,7], resonators [8,9,10], bearings [11,12,13], nano strain sensors [14,15], and nanomotors [16,17,18,19,20,21,22]. The two mechanical properties are superhigh in-shell strength [23] and inter-shell superlubrication [11,24,25] due to the special electron configuration of carbon atoms in CNT. The delocalized anti-bond p-electron of each carbon atom causes inter-shell superlubrication which leads to extremely low energy dissipation during the motion of CNT components [26]

Methods

Results

Conclusion