The effect of chirality on the torsion of nanotubes embedded in an elastic medium using doublet mechanics

Abstract

In this paper, the torsion of nanotubes embedded in an elastic medium is studied using doublet mechanics wherein the governing equations take the effects of scale parameter and chirality explicitly and simultaneously into account. Using this approach, it is shown that the effect of chirality is present only in the scaling theory. Thus, if the scaling characteristics of the nanotube are deemed important so is the chirality. Specifically, the effects of parameters such as the chiral angle, scale parameter, geometric properties of the nanotubes and boundary conditions are investigated in detail. It is shown that increasing the scale parameter causes an increase in the angular displacement. Also, by considering the effect of chirality, it is shown that the armchair arrangement of the nanotube has a higher torsional stiffness than the zigzag arrangement. The results of the present work are compared with the nonlocal theory, numerical methods and molecular simulations and good agreement with the latter approaches is observed.