Wave Propagation in Periodically Supported Nanoribbons: A Nonlocal Elasticity Approach

We develop an analytical formulation describing propagating flexural waves in periodically simply supported nanoribbons by means of Eringen's nonlocal elasticity. The nonlocal length scale is identified via atomistic finite element (FE) models of graphene nanoribbons with Floquet's boundary conditions. The analytical model is calibrated through the atomistic finite element approach. This is done by matching the nondimensional frequencies predicted by the analytical nonlocal model and those obtained by the atomistic FE simulations. We show that a nanoribbon with periodically supported boundary conditions does exhibit artificial pass-stop band characteristics. Moreover, the nonlocal elasticity solution proposed in this paper captures the dispersive behavior of nanoribbons when an increasing number of flexural modes are considered.