Thermo-mechanical vibration of a single-walled carbon nanotube embedded in an elastic medium based on nonlocal elasticity theory

A single-elastic beam model has been developed to analyze the thermal vibration of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) based on thermal elasticity mechanics, and nonlocal elasticity theory. The nonlocal elasticity takes into account the effect of small size into the formulation. Further, the SWCNT is assumed to be embedded in an elastic medium. A Winkler-type elastic foundation is employed to model the interaction of the SWCNT and the surrounding elastic medium. Differential quadrature method is being utilized and numerical solutions for thermal-vibration response of SWCNT is obtained. Influence of nonlocal small scale effects, temperature change, Winkler constant and vibration modes of the CNT on the frequency are investigated. The present study shows that for low temperature changes, the difference between local frequency and nonlocal frequency is comparatively high. With embedded CNT, for soft elastic medium and larger scale coefficients (e(0)a) the nonlocal frequencies are comparatively lower. The nonlocal model-frequencies are always found smaller than the local model-frequencies at all temperature changes considered. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.