be K.E

utive les a olec con roac proposed herein that the nanotube, the local polymer near the nanotube, and the nanotube/polymer interface can be modeled as an polymer composites may provide order-of-magnitude tions of continuum mechanics. However, for nanos-echnoequivalent-continuum model of a nanotube/polymer composite with established micromechanical models toincreases in strength and stiffness when compared to typi-cal carbon fiber/polymer composites. In order to facil-itate the development of nanotube-reinforced polymer composites, constitutive relationships must be devel-oped that predict the bulk mechanical properties of the composite as a function of molecular structure of the polymer, nanotube, and polymer/nanotube interface. For computational simplicity, and to adequately address scale-up issues, it is desirable to couple an tructured materials, such as nanotube-reinforced polymers, a typical single-walled nanotube (SWNT) may have a diameter of approximately 1–10109 m, compared to the typical carbon-fiber diameter of 50106 m, which leads to a breakdown of the rules and requirements for continuum modeling. Even though a limited number of studies have attempted to address the applicability of continuum micromechanics to nanotube-reinforced polymer composites [3,4], ittwo SWNT/polyimide composite systems