A Semi-Analytical Evaluation of Surface and Nonlocal Effects on Buckling and Vibrational Characteristics of Nanotubes with Various Boundary Conditions

In the present paper, the vibrational and buckling characteristics of nanotubes with various boundary conditions are investigated considering the coupled effects of nonlocal elasticity and surface effects, including surface elasticity and surface tension. The nonlocal Eringen theory is adopted to consider the effect of small scale size, and the Gurtin–Murdoch model the surface effect. Hamilton’s principle is employed to formulate the governing equation and differential transformation method (DTM) is utilized to obtain the natural frequency and critical buckling load of nanotubes with various boundary conditions. The results obtained match the available ones in the literature. Detailed mathematical derivations are presented and numerical investigations are performed. The emphasis is placed on the effects of several parameters, such as the nonlocal parameter, surface effect, aspect ratio, mode number and beam size, on the normalized natural frequencies and critical buckling loads of the nanotube. It is explicitly shown that the vibration and buckling of a nanotube is significantly influenced by these effects. Numerical results are presented which may serve as benchmarks for future analysis of nanotubes.