Developing nanoscale inertial measurement systems with carbon nanotube oscillators

Abstract

We have developed a conceptual design for an inertial measurement system using the oscillatory characteristics of carbon nanotube (CNT) oscillators with or without fillings, and performed molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to investigate its dynamic operations. In the operations, the instantaneous equilibrium position, which is uniquely related to the rotation, is traced by monitoring the variations of the tip-surface capacitance, i.e., the capacitance between a spherical cap of the oscillating CNT and an adjacent metallic plate. The MD simulations for the three model systems: the (5, 5)&(10, 10) CNT system, and the (10, 10)&(15, 15) CNT system with copper and gold fillings, respectively, show that the induced variations of the tip-surface capacitance can be significantly enhanced by increasing the size and the weight of the oscillating core of such an inertial measurement system.

General Rolled-Up and Polyhedral Models for Carbon Nanotubes

“…where ξ = (nψ -π )/m and a 1 , a 2 and a 3 are the basis vector lengths (3). Equation (4) may have many roots but here we are interested in the first positive real root of (4).…”

“…Since the landmark paper on CNTs in 1991 (1) there have been many theoretical and experimental investigations of the properties of CNTs, such as their large axial Young's modulus and their high mechanical strength (2,3). The majority of work on the structure of CNTs is based on the conventional rolled-up model (4,5,6), for which it is assumed that a flat sheet of graphene comprising bonds of the same bond length is rolled into a seamless right circular cylinder.…”

Formic Acid Electrooxidation by a Platinum Nanotubule Array Electrode

“…These types of structures present many potential advantages, including fewer diffusion impeding interfaces with polymeric binders, more facile pathways for electron transfer, and more effective exposure of active surface sites. Such 1D metallic nanostructures have been fabricated by a variety of methods, including template-based methods (wetting [1][2][3][4] and electrosynthesis or electrodeposition [5][6][7][8][9][10][11]), electrospinning [12], deposition onto nanowire or nanofiber supports [13][14][15], and others [16][17][18][19]. To date, most studies of these nanomaterials have focused on demonstrating the viability of the nanofabrication process and describing fundamental material properties such as morphology, composition, and crystal structure with far less attention paid to their functional properties.…”

“…Electrocatalytic studies of 1D metal nanostructures have focused on small organic molecules, in particular those important to fuel cell applications such as methanol [7,8,11,20,21] and formic acid [19,[22][23][24][25]. Often, such studies are only cursory merely demonstrating some degree of electrocatalytic activity with no comparison to a standard catalyst or quantification of kinetic parameters, with the focus being on the fabrication process and other material properties [7].…”

Fabrication and characterization of boron nanowires at relatively low temperature

“…In recent years, one-dimensional (1D) boron nanostructure has aroused greatly interesting research from both scientific and technological areas, because it has unique chemical and physical properties and its theoretically tubular structure may have higher electrical conductivity than carbon nanotubes [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. These properties make boron or boride nanostructures potentially use in high-temperature devices, fusion-reactor wall components, thermoelectric energy conversion, especially for the application of field emission (FE), cold-cathode materials, field effect transistors (FET), and so on [8,9].…”