Axially compressed buckling of pressured multiwall carbon nanotubes

Abstract This paper studies axially compressed buckling of an individual multiwall carbon nanotube subjected to an internal or external radial pressure. The emphasis is placed on new physical phenomena due to combined axial stress and radial pressure. According to the radius-to-thickness ratio, multiwall carbon nanotubes discussed here are classified into three types: thin, thick, and (almost) solid. The critical axial stress and the buckling mode are calculated for various radial pressures, with detailed comparison to the classic results of singlelayer elastic shells under combined loadings. It is shown that the buckling mode associated with the minimum axial stress is determined uniquely for multiwall carbon nanotubes under combined axial stress and radial pressure, while it is not unique under pure axial stress. In particular, a thin N -wall nanotube (defined by the radius-to-thickness ratio larger than 5) is shown to be approximately equivalent to a single layer elastic shell whose effective bending stiffness and thickness are N times the effective bending stiffness and thickness of singlewall carbon nanotubes. Based on this result, an approximate method is suggested to substitute a multiwall nanotube of many layers by a multilayer elastic shell of fewer layers with acceptable relative errors. Especially, the present results show that the predicted increase of the critical axial stress due to an internal radial pressure appears to be in qualitative agreement with some known results for filled singlewall carbon nanotubes obtained by molecular dynamics simulations.