Mechanical buckling of nanocomposites: Experimental and numerical investigations

The proposed research explores Multi-Walled Carbon Nanotube’s (MWCNT’s) effect on the mechanical buckling behavior of glass fiber-enhanced thermosetting composites using UTM and the load vs displacement curve is plotted. Using the inflection point method, the critical buckling load is obtained from the load vs displacement curve for beams with three different volume fractions of MWCNT. The nonlinear finite element method is used to numerically obtain the load vs deflection curve and the numerical results are compared with the experimental results, and a close match is found with the experimental results. It is observed that the nonlinearity associated with the structure can significantly reduce the critical buckling load. The critical buckling load is found to increase and reported a 27.4% increase in buckling load with 0.3 wt.% of MWCNT which could be accounted for the increase in flexural modulus of the material.