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°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°C after the first thermal cycle.