Passive damping of carbon nanotube thread

Passive damping of as-spun carbon nanotube thread was studied here as a multifunctional attribute to continuous fiber composite materials or nanocomposites. Many researchers have doped polymeric materials like epoxy with carbon nanotubes to achieve enhanced damping for composite materials; yet thread or yarn has to be rigorously explored. As a result, this study quantifies carbon nanotube thread material damping within its linear range (~1% strain) at a single frequency and analyzes this damping as a function of temperature from room temperature to roughly 100 degrees C. From these tests, it was found that three distinct carbon nanotube threads exhibited loss factors near 0.05 at room temperature, and a single carbon nanotube thread maintained a loss factor near 0.035 from room temperature to 100 degrees C after the first thermal cycle.