A Review on Fracture Analysis of CNT/Graphene Reinforced Composites for Structural Applications

CNT/Graphene reinforced composites due to their exceptional mechanical, electrical, thermal, and optical characteristics that have attracted the scientific community working in the area of material development. In protraction, this review work on fracture analysis of CNT/Graphene reinforced composites is summarized from an exponentially growing literature inclusive of fabrication methods and present and potential applications. Owing to these composites' enormous structural applications, the number of literature works on the fracture of the structures using various models is summarized here. The literature contains several techniques to model the CNT/graphene composites that include: Halpin Tsai model, modified Halpin Tsai model, Mori-Tanaka model, homogenization approach, etc. which are discussed in detail. Various combined analysis for fracture toughness and crack growth analysis based on fracture mechanics are cited here using different computational formulations like finite element method (FEM), element free Galerkin method, reproducing kernel particle method, meshless local Petrov-Galerkin method, extended finite element method (XFEM), isogeometric analysis (IGA), etc. In particular, the authors have reported the work done in the area of fracture analysis of these novel composites since its inception that is inclusive of its structure, fabrication, properties, mathematical modeling, applications, and analysis.