ABSTRACT
The atomistic modeling approaches such as the molecular dy-
namics, the tight-binding method, and the first-principle quantum
mechanics, which are shown in the previous chapter, yield results
that are in many cases explicit in nature. However, they become
less practical, especially in problems involving a large number
of carbon atoms (e.g., long MWNTs or nanotube bundles), or to
compare with experiments that are conducted at a much longer
time scale due to the limitation in time scales (typically, several
nanoseconds or less) and length scales of the models. Moreover, for
practical applications, phenomenological continuum-basedmaterial
parameters such as Young’s modulus and Poisson’s ratio need to be
defined and measured for the carbon nanotubes. Therefore, it is of
fundamental value to develop reliable and computationally efficient
continuummodels for the nanotubes, which should closely duplicate
the constitutive behaviors obtained from atomistic simulations [71].
