Carbon-nanotube (CNT) -based strain sensors have the potential to overcome some of the limitations in small-scale force/displacement sensing technologies due to their small size and high sensitivity to strain. A better understanding of the dominant and limiting causes of high strain sensitivity is needed to enable the design and manufacture of high-performance sensor systems. This paper presents the theoretical framework that makes it possible to predict the strain sensitivity of a carbon nanotube based on it chiral indices $\left(n,m\right)$. This framework is extended to capture the behavior of sensors composed of multiple CNTs in a parallel resistor network. This framework has been used to predict that a parallel resistor network of more than 100 randomly selected CNTs should have a gauge factor of approximately $78.5\pm 0.4$. This is within the experimental error of the measured gauge factor of $75\pm 5$ for such CNT resistor networks.

• Received 24 May 2010

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.82.115428