Molecular Dynamics Research of a Carbon Nanotube-buckyball Enabled Energy Attraction System

An energy attraction system (EAS) composed of a carbon nanotube (CNT) with nested buckyballs is put forward for energy excess during impact owing to the outstanding mechanical attributes of both CNTs and buckyballs. Here we perform a series of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to investigate the energy attraction capabilities of several different EASs based on a diversity of design parameters. For example, the effects of impact energy, the number of nested buckyballs, and of the size of the buckyballs are analyzed to optimize the energy attraction capability of the EASs by tuning the pertinent design parameters. Simulation results indicate that the energy attraction capability of the EAS is closely associated with the deformation characteristics of the confined buckyballs. A low impact energy leads to retrievable deformation of the buckyballs and the dissipated energy is mainly converted to thermal energy. However, a high impact energy yields non-retrievable deformation of buckyballs and thus the energy dissipation is dominated by the strain energy of the EAS. The simulation results also reveal that there exists an optimum value of the number of buckyballs for an EAS under a given impact energy. Larger buckyballs are able to disfigure to a larger degree yet also need less impact energy to induce plastic deformation, therefore performing with a better overall energy attraction ability. Overall, the EAS in this study shows a remarkably high energy attraction density of 2 kJ g-1, it is a promising candidate for mitigating impact energy and sheds light on the research of buckyball filled CNTs for another applications.