Catastrophic failure of nanotube bundles, interpreted with a new statistical nonlinear theory

In a interesting letter, Xiao et al. interpreted experimental results on the failure of nanotube bundles using Weibull Statistics. The prediction of the force versus strain curve was smooth. Nevertheless, abrupt jumps in the force were clearly observed experimentally, corresponding to the failure of subbundles. Accordingly, we have developed a simple modification of the Weibull Statistics able to treat the observed catastrophic and discrete failure, considering a linear or nonlinear elastic constitutive law.