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Scaling law for the onset of the surface wrinkling of multilayer tubes

Surface wrinkling is an instability mode that is often observed in a wide variety of multilayer tubes under bending deformation. When the degree of applied bending exceeds a critical value, wrinkles appear at the intrados of the tube and release a large amount of in-plane strain energy stored by bending deformation. In the present work, we propose a simple theoretical model for evaluating the critical curvature and critical bending moment for the occurrence of wrinkling in multilayer tubes and apply the model to carbon nanotubes in a case study. Results indicate an inverse proportional relationship between the two critical properties, which holds true regardless of the number of layers and the size of the hollow core.