Surface and thermal load effects on the buckling of curved nanowires

This paper investigates the impact of surface energy and thermal loading on the static stability of nanowires. We model nanowires as curved fixed–fixed Euler-Bernoulli beams and use Gurtin-Murdoch model to represent surface energy. The model takes into account both von Kármán strain and axial strain. We derive the nanowire equilibrium equations and deploy it to investigate the buckling of nanowires. We report the wire rise, critical buckling loads, and buckled wire configurations as functions of axial load in the presence of thermal loads. We found that surface energy has significant effect on the behaviour of silicon nanowires of diameter less than 4 nm. We also found that critical buckling load increases with increase in surface tensile stress and decreases with thermal loading.