On the study of elastic properties of CNT-reinforced composites based on element-free MLS method with nanoscale cylindrical representative volume element

This paper presents a micromechanical element-free method to study elastic properties of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) reinforced composites. A three-dimensional nanoscale cylindrical representative volume element (RVE) has been considered in the analysis, in which CNT and matrix are both modeled as elastic materials based on continuum mechanics. The proposed model is used to investigate the behaviors of CNT-reinforced composites with respect to their effective mechanical properties. The relevant formulas to extract the effective material constants for three loading cases are derived in detail, based on the elasticity theory. Besides, the meshless method based on the moving least-squares (MLS) approximation and element-free Galerkin (EFG) method is implemented to evaluate the established model. The computed results are compared with the available solutions obtained from other analytical and numerical methods. Moreover, these results show that the presence of CNTs can significantly improve the longitudinal and transverse characteristics of the composite materials.