Computational analysis of mechanical performance of carbon nanotubes with defects

The discovery of carbon nanotubes in 1991 spurred a wide area of research, with a large portion of current nanoscience research involving carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes have been proposed for a variety of applications due to their impressive mechanical, electrical and thermal properties. An introduction to carbon nanotubes and their mechanical, electrical and thermal properties are reviewed in this report. An introduction to molecular dynamics simulations is also reviewed in this report, where various thermodynamic ensembles and integration algorithms are discussed. We acquire the results of molecular mechanics simulations using the Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator (LAMMPS) molecular dynamics code and examine the stress versus strain curves that 3 different armchair carbon nanotubes, (6,6), (10,10), (12,12) have on the ultimate tensile stress of a single tube.Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical Engineering