Mechanics Research Communications 56 (2014) 130135

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Mechanics Research Communications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/mechrescom

Vibrational analysis of carbon nanocones under different boundary

conditions: An analytical approach
R. Ansari, H. Rouhi , A. Nasiri Rad
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Guilan, P.O. Box 41635-3756, Rasht, Iran

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 14 February 2013
Received in revised form
16 December 2013
Accepted 30 December 2013
Available online 10 January 2014
Keywords:
Carbon nanocone
Free vibration
Eringens elasticity
Boundary condition

a b s t r a c t
The purpose of this study is to analytically investigate the free vibration of carbon nanocones (CNCs)
under different types of boundary conditions. The Donnell shell theory and nonlocal elasticity are used
to derive the governing equations of motion. The analytical Galerkin method together with beam mode
shapes as weighting functions is employed to solve the problem. Making use of the beam modal functions
enables us to examine the role of boundary condition in the vibrational behavior of CNCs. The effects of
boundary conditions, semivertex angle and nonlocal parameter on the response of CNCs are explored.
2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Carbon nanocones (CNCs) were discovered in 1994 (Ge and
Sattler, 1994) and the mathematical modeling of their atomic structure was done in the same year (Terrones, 1994; Balaban et al.,
1994). They can be found on the caps of nanotubes and also as
free-standing structures generated in a carbon arc (Dresselhaus
et al., 1995). There are several potential applications for CNCs
such as in the scanning near-eld optical microscope, atomic force
microscopy imaging and eld emission (Chang et al., 2005; Chen
et al., 2006; Huo et al., 2008).
The mechanical behaviors of nanostructures are studied by both
theoretical and experimental methods. In this respect, the reader
is referred to Qian et al. (2002) for a comprehensive review on
these methods. Generally, conducting controlled experiments for
the nanostructures is difcult and prohibitively expensive. Hence,
theoretical modeling has been the main tool for studying the properties of structures at the nanoscale. The theoretical approaches
can be categorized as atomic modeling and continuum modeling.
The methods which belong to the rst category are usually computationally expensive especially for the structures with a large
number of atoms. In other hand, continuum mechanics is a computationally efcient technique for modeling large scale systems
at the nanometer scale. In addition, the necessity of using modied versions of continuum mechanics arises since the small scale

Corresponding author. Tel.: +98 131 6690276; fax: +98 131 6690276.
E-mail address: rouhi.hessam@gmail.com (H. Rouhi).
0093-6413/$ see front matter 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mechrescom.2013.12.010

effects in nanostructures cannot be incorporated into the classical

continuum models. Among these modied theories, the nonlocal
elasticity theory proposed by Eringen (1983, 2002) has attracted
worldwide attention.
The free vibration characteristics of nanocones and tapered
nanorods are receiving considerable attention in recent years
(Danesh et al., 2011; Fakhrabadi et al., 2012; Firouz-Abadi et al.,
2012a; Shu and Shau, 2012; Lee and Lee, 2012; Chang, 2012; Hu
et al., 2012; Firouz-Abadi et al., 2012b; Aranda-Ruiz et al., 2012).
Danesh et al. (2011) studied the axial vibration of tapered nanorods
using Eringens nonlocal elasticity theory. They used the differential quadrature method to solve the problem for tapered nanorods
under clampedclamped, clampedfree and xedattached spring
boundary conditions. Fakhrabadi et al. (2012) conducted a molecular mechanics study on the vibrations of CNCs. Firouz-Abadi et al.
(2012a) used a nonlocal shell model to investigate the free vibrations of nanocones with simply-supported boundary conditions.
Shu and Shau (2012) analyzed the axial vibration of CNCs by developing a rod model based on the nonlocal elasticity theory. Lee and
Lee (2012) employed a nite element-based approach to study the
vibrational behavior of xed carbon nanocones. Based on the nonlocal continuum mechanics, Chang (2012) developed a rod model
so as to investigate the axial vibration of non-uniform and nonhomogeneous nanorods. Hu et al. (2012) conducted molecular
dynamics (MD) simulations to calculate the fundamental frequencies of transverse vibrations of cantilevered carbon nanocones.
Also, Firouz-Abadi et al. (2012b) used MD simulations to study the
vibrations of cantilevered carbon nanocones up to 4 nm in height.
Aranda-Ruiz et al. (2012) applied Eringens nonlocal elasticity in

R. Ansari et al. / Mechanics Research Communications 56 (2014) 130135

131

where u0 , v0 , and w0 are mid-surface displacements, and, x and

 are mid-surface rotations. The relations of strains are given by


x

0

0
x

+z

k
kx

(4)

0 are mid-surface strains, and, k , k are curvawhere 0x , 0 , and x

x 
ture changes and kx is twist change which are dened as

Fig. 1. Schematic of a nanocone: geometry and coordinate system

order to investigate the bending vibrations of rotating non-uniform

nanocantilevers.
A survey of the literature shows that the majority of the previous
studies on the free vibration of CNCs are restricted to the simplysupported or clampedfree boundary conditions. The boundary
conditions are expected to considerably affect the vibrational
behavior of nanostructures. Therefore, in this work, an analytical
approach is presented for the free vibrations of CNCs under different boundary conditions. The CNCs are modeled based on the
Donnell shell theory. Eringens nonlocal elasticity is also used to
take the small scale effects into account. The solution methodology is based on the Galerkin approach. The beam functions are
employed as weight functions which help to solve the eigenvalue
problem for various types of boundary conditions. The effects of
nonlocal parameter, apex angle and aspect ratio on natural frequency are fully investigated.
2. Nonlocal shell model

0x =

u0
x

0 =

1 v0
w0 cos()
u0 sin()
+
+
R(x) 
R(x)
R(x)

(1 (e0 a)2 2 ) = t

v0 sin()
v0
1 u0
+

R(x) 
R(x)
x

0 =
x

and

x =

2 w0
x2

 =

2 w0
cos() v0
+
2
2
R(x) x
R(x) 
1

x =

sin() w0
cos() v0
1 2 w0
v sin() cos()
+
+

2
2
R(x) x
R(x) x
R(x) 
R(x)

Nx

N =
Nx
Mx

M =
Mx

h/2

h/2

x

 dz
x

h/2

h/2

x

(7)

 zdz

By substituting Eq. (2) into Eqs. (7) and (8) and by performing
mathematical manipulations one can derive the following governing equations in accordance with Donnells shell theory (Donnell,
1976)

where t is the stress tensor and e0 a is the nonlocal parameter which

leads to consider the small scale effect. By using Hookes law, the
stressstrain relation is thus expressed by

L21 u + L22 v + L23 w = h(1 (e0 a)2 2 )v0


x

(e0 a)2 2


x

E
1 2
E
1 2

E
1 2
1
1 2

xx



x

(2)

where the overdot indicates derivative with respect to time and the
operators Lij (i, j = 1, 2, 3) are given in Appendix.
3. Solution method
The displacement eld can be assumed as
(x)
cos(n)ejt

u0 (x, , t) = U(x, )ejt = A

u(x, , z) = u0 (x, ) + z

x (x, )

w0 (x, , t) = W (x, )ejt = C(x) cos(n)ejt

v(x, , z) = v0 (x, ) + z

 (x, )

w(x, , z) = w0 (x, )

(9)

0
L31 u + L32 v + L33 w = h(1 (e0 a)2 2 )w

where E and  are Youngs modulus and Poissons ratio, respectively. Based on the classic shell theory, the three-dimensional
displacement components are given by

(3)

(8)

x

L11 u + L12 v + L13 w = h(1 (e0 a)2 2 )u 0

xx

(6)

(1)

xx

in which R(x) denotes the radius of cone in arbitrary point and

is the semi vertex angle. The stress and moment resultants can be
expressed by the following relations

Consider a nanocone treated as an elastic conical shell with the

thickness of h, length of L, mass density of  and semivertex angle
of , as shown in Fig. 1. R1 and R2 are the radii of the nanocone
at its small and large edges, respectively. According to Eringens
nonlocal elasticity theory, it is assumed that the stress at a point is
a function of strains at all points in the continuum. In the context of
two-dimensional nonlocal elasticity, the constitutive equation in a
differential form can be expressed as (Eringen, 2002)

(5)

v0 (x, , t) = V (x, )ejt = B(x) sin(n)ejt

(10)

in which (x) is the beam function, denotes the natural frequency

and A, B and C are constants parameters. Solving the beam equation
leads to the following equation for (x) (Loy and Lam, 1997)

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R. Ansari et al. / Mechanics Research Communications 56 (2014) 130135

Table 1
Values of i , m , m for all different boundary conditions.
Boundary conditions

Simply supportedsimply supported (SS)

Clampedclamped (CC)

m

m

cos m cosh m = 1

cosh m cos m
sinh m sin m

Freefree (FF)

cos m cosh m = 1

cosh m cos m
sinh m sin m

Simply supportedclamped (SC)

tan m = tanh m

cosh m cos m
sinh m sin m

Clampedfree (CF)

cos m cosh m = 1

sinh m sin m
cosh m +cos m

Freesimply supported (FS)

tan m = tanh m

cosh m cos m
sinh m sin m

(x) = 1 cosh

 x
m

m 3 sinh

+ 2 cos

 x
m
L

 x
m
L

+ 4 sin

4. Results and discussion

 x 
m
L

  

L11 u + L12 v + L13 w Ah2 A(1 (e0 a)2 2 )



 

 

In this section, the natural frequency and frequency ratio (the

ratio of nonlocal-to-local frequency) of vibrating CNCs are obtained
for various apex angles, circumferential wavenumbers, ratio of
length-to-average radius and different magnitudes of nonlocal
parameter. The values of Youngs modulus and Poissons ratio are
obtained by 0.89 cos4 TPa and 0.25 cos2 , respectively, and the
mass density is assumed to be 2237 kg/m3 (Wei and Srivastava,
2004). Also, the wall thickness is considered as 0.34 nm.
Figs. 2 and 3 show the variation of natural frequency of CNCs
under simply supportedsimply supported and clampedclamped
boundary conditions for various nonlocal parameters. In order to

(11)

where i stands for the coefcients which depend on boundary

conditions. The values of these coefcients can be 1, 0 or 1. n is
the circumferential wave number and m represents the roots of
transcendental equations which are obtained from the boundary
conditions and m is a parameter related to m . The values of i ,
m , m are listed in Table 1 for different boundary conditions.
Based on the Galerkin method, by substituting Eq. (10) into (9)
and multiplying each equation by its weight function and by integrating the weighted residuals over the domain, one would arrive
at

(x)
cos(n)ejt ux sin ddx = 0
x
(12)

[L21 u + L22 v + L33 w Bh2 (1 (e0 a)2 2 )(x) sin(n)ejt ]vx sin ddx = 0
[L31 u + L32 v + L33 w Ch2 (1 (e0 a)2 2 )(x) cos(n)ejt ]wx sin ddx = 0

The above system of equations can be recast in the form of a

generalized eigenvalue problem. By solving the eigenvalue problem, the resonant frequencies of CNCs can be obtained and the
associated eigenvectors yield the corresponding mode shapes.

illustrate the effects of the small scale, different values of nonlocal

parameter have been considered ranging from e0 a = 0 to e0 a = 2 mm.

20
18

18

16

Natural frequency [THz]

16
14
0

12

0.1

10

0.2

12

0.1

10

0.2
0.5

2
0

14

0.5

Natural frequency [THz]

20

10

12

Circumferenal wavenumber

Fig. 2. Natural frequency of CNC for various nonlocal parameters under simply
supportedsimply supported boundary conditions with respect to the circumferential wave numbers (2 = 19.2 , L/R0 = 10)

10

12

Circumferenal wavenumber
Fig. 3. Natural frequency of CNC for various nonlocal parameters under
clampedclamped boundary conditions with respect to the circumferential wave
numbers (2 = 19.2 , L/R0 = 10)

R. Ansari et al. / Mechanics Research Communications 56 (2014) 130135

10

Natural frequency [THz]

2.5
2

SS
CC

1.5

FF
SC

FC
SF

0.5

Fundamental frequency [THz]

133

0.4

0.8

1.2

6
5

1.6

3
2
1
0

10

12

20

40

60

Fig. 4. Natural frequency of CNC under different boundary conditions with respect
to the circumferential wave number (2 = 19.2 , e0 a = 0.5, L/R0 = 10)

120

Fundamental frequency [THz]

SS

1
Frequency rao

100

Fig. 7. Fundamental frequency of clampedclamped CNC with respect to apex angle

for various nonlocal parameters (L/R0 = 10)

1.2

CC

0.8

CF

0.6
0.4
0.2
0

80

Apex angle

Circumferenal wavenumber

0.4

0.8

1.2

1.6

1
0

0.5

1.5

20

40

60

80

100

120

Apex angle

2.5

Fig. 8. Fundamental frequency of clampedfree CNC with respect to apex angle for
various nonlocal parameters (L/R0 = 10)

It is found that the natural frequency decreases with increasing the

nonlocal parameter.
Fig. 4 shows the variation of natural frequency of CNCs
under different boundary conditions against the circumferential
wavenumber. It is observed that for all types of boundary conditions, the minimum of the curves occurs at n = 1 or n = 2, while the
maximum of them occurs at n = 5. The value of nonlocal parameter in this graph is taken to be 0.5 nm. In Fig. 5, the variation
of frequency ratio for three types of boundary conditions against

Fundamental frequency [THz]

8
7

0.4
0.8

1.2

1.6

2
1
0

nonlocal parameter is given and it is observed that as the nonlocal

parameter increases, the frequency ratio of CNC decreases.
The effects of apex angle on the vibrations of CNC with different boundary conditions are shown in Figs. 68. It can be seen that
for clampedfree boundary conditions, the maximum fundamental frequency happens at 19.2 , and for other boundary conditions
happens at 38.9 .
The relation between the fundamental frequency and aspect
ratio for three kinds of boundary conditions is investigated in
Figs. 911. As seen from these gures, when the ratio of lengthto-average radius increases, the fundamental frequency tends to
decrease and the effect of small scale diminishes so that the
8
7
Fundamental frequency

Fig. 5. Ratio of nonlocal-to-local frequency with respect to nonlocal parameter for

SS, CC and CF boundary conditions (L/R0 = 10)

0.4

0.8

1.2

1.6

20

40

60

80

100

120

10

20

30

40

50

Apex angle
Fig. 6. Fundamental frequency of simply supportedsimply supported CNC with
respect to apex angle for various nonlocal parameters (L/R0 = 10)

Fig. 9. Fundamental frequency of simply supportedsimply supported CNC with

respect to ratio of length-to-average radius for various nonlocal parameters

134

R. Ansari et al. / Mechanics Research Communications 56 (2014) 130135

10
9

L12 =

(A12 + A66 ) 2
(A22 + A66 ) sin

R(x)
x

R2 (x)

L21 =

(A22 + A66 ) sin

(A12 + A66 ) 2
+
R(x)
x

R2 (x)

Fundamental frequency

8
7
6

0.4

0.8

1.2
1.6

10

20

30

40

50

Fig. 10. Fundamental frequency of clampedclamped CNC with respect to ratio of

length-to-average radius for various nonlocal parameters

L13 =

Fundamental frequency

0.4
0.8

3
2

10

20

30

40

frequency envelopes corresponding to different nonlocal parameters tend to converge.

5. Conclusion
Eringens nonlocal theory was used for the free vibration analysis of carbon nanocones. To this end, a shell model was developed
based on Donnells theory. To solve the problem, the analytical
Galerkin method was employed together with beam mode shapes
as weighting functions. Due to importance of boundary conditions upon the mechanical behavior of nanostructures, the analysis
was carried out for all possible types of boundary conditions. The
effects of nonlocal parameter and geometrical parameters on natural frequency were investigated. According to this study, increasing
the nonlocal parameter led to decreasing the frequency ratio. The
change in the fundamental frequency of CNCs with the variation of
apex angle was shown to be dependent on the type of boundary
conditions. For example, the fundamental frequency of simplysupported CNCs decreases with the increase of apex angle, whereas
in the case of CNCs with clampedfree boundary conditions there
was no a specic trend in the frequencyapex angle curve.
Appendix.
The partial operators appeared in Eq. (9):
L11 = A11

2
A22 sin2
A66 2
A11 sin

+ 2
+
2
2
R(x)
x
x
R (x)
R (x)  2

2
 2

A22 sin cos

A12 cos

R(x)
x
R2 (x)

50

Fig. 11. Fundamental frequency of clampedfree CNC with respect to ratio of lengthto-average radius for various nonlocal parameters

[D22 4D66 ] sin cos 2

x
R3 (x)

L32 =

2
sin
sin2

+
2
2
R(x) x
x2
R2 (x)

(D12 + 2D66 ) cos 3

D22 cos 3

R2 (x)
x2 
R4 (x)  3

1.6

A22
D22 cos2
+
2
R (x)
R4 (x)

L31 =

1.2

4D22 cos sin2

A22 cos

2
R (x)
R4 (x)

L23 =

6
0

 

A22 sin cos

A12 cos

R(x)
x
R2 (x)

sin
2
sin2
+
2
2
R(x)
x
x
R (x)

D66 cos2
+2
R2 (x)

1
0


L22 = A66

A22 cos
(2D12 + 2D22 8D66 ) cos sin2

2
R (x)
R4 (x)

D22 cos 3
(D12 + 4D66 ) cos 3
+
R4 (x)  3
R2 (x)
x2 

(D22 + 2D12 8D66 ) cos sin

R3 (x)

L33 =

4
A22 cos2
2(D12 + 2D66 ) cos 4
D11 4
2
R (x)
x
R2 (x)
x2  2

D22 4
2D11 sin 3
2(D12 + 4D66 ) sin 3

+
4
4
3
R(x)
R (x) 
x
R3 (x)
x 2

D22 sin2 2
2(D12 + D22 + 2D66 ) sin2 2

R2 (x)
x2
R4 (x)
 2

D22 sin3
x
R3 (x)

where the stiffness coefcients Aij and Dij are dened as


{Aij , Dij } =

h/2

h/2

Qij {1, z 2 }dz

(i, j = 1, 2, 6)

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