Surface effects on the buckling of nanowire networks

Abstract

We present a finite-element model to analyze the buckling behaviours of two-dimensional nanowire (NW) networks. When the classical beam model is applied to model the building block NW it is found that the simple plate theory can be approximately used to describe this network. However, it is known that surface effects become dominant when the thickness of the NW reduces to nanoscale. Therefore, the buckling behaviours of the networks can be significantly affected by surface effects. Then the classical beam theory together with the Young-Laplace equation is applied to give a modified beam model to capture the surface effects. The results from this modified model demonstrate that the surface effects have significant influence not only on the critical force but also on the buckling modes, which suggests that the above simple plate theory fails to describe the networks when the surface effects are considered.