Comment on 'Computation of Young's moduli for chiral single-walled carbon nanotubes' [Appl. Phys. Lett. 88, 251908 (2006)]

摘要

In a recent letter, based on a molecular mechanics approach, Leung et al. proposed an energy-equivalent model to establish computational formula of Young's modulus for single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) by equating the molecular potential energy of a SWCNT to the mechanical strain energy of an equivalent continuum shell. In this Comment, we point out some mistakes in Ref. 1 which might influence their final results and conclusions. In Ref. 1, a chiral SWCNT was treated as an armchair tube twisted by an angle, and some basic equations for armchair tubes were modified to deduce explicit expressions for Young's modulus of a chiral SWCNT. Unfortunately, some special conditions that only hold in armchair tubes were directly used for chiral tubes.