Abstract：Owing to the coupling effect between interlayer spacing and stacking angle, the interlayer friction in incommensurate double walled carbon nanotubes (DWCNTs) exhibits complex behavior and remains to be understood. Molecular dynamics simulation (MD) was applied in this paper to study the interlayer friction in incommensurate DWCNTs. In the calculations, the chiral angle of the outer tube was kept as 0° or 30°, while the chiral angle of the inner tube varied from 0°~30°. The results show that the interlayer friction is larger for smaller interlayer spacing or smaller difference in interlayer chiral angles. When the chiral angle difference is larger than 10° and the interlayer spacing is round 0.34 nm, the interlayer friction is linearly dependent on the interlayer spacing. The results show also that the friction force on edge atoms is significantly higher than that on inner atoms, indicating the edge effect is a general effect in nanoscale friction.
2015, Vol. 36 
