Sudden stoppage of rotor in a thermally driven rotary motor made from double-walled carbon nanotubes

In a thermally driven rotary motor made from double-walled carbon nanotubes, the rotor (inner tube) can be actuated to rotate within the stator (outer tube) when the environmental temperature is high enough. A sudden stoppage of the rotor can occur when the inner tube has been actuated to rotate at a stable high speed. To find the mechanisms of such sudden stoppages, eight motor models with the same rotor but different stators are built and simulated in the canonical NVT ensembles. Numerical results demonstrate that the sudden stoppage of the rotor occurs when the difference between radii is near 0.34 nm at a high environmental temperature. A smaller difference between radii does not imply easier activation of the sudden rotor stoppage. During rotation, the positions and electron density distribution of atoms at the ends of the motor show that a sp 1 bonded atom on the rotor is attracted by the sp 1 atom with the biggest deviation of radial position on the sta...

K Cai, J Z Yu, H Yin and Q H Qin

Click for full article