1. Introduction
Carbon nanostructures present outstanding mechanical properties such as very high Young modulus and tensile strength
combined with low density [1–3] which have motivated many
researchers to develop new methodologies for the analysis of
physical properties of such new materials. The ab initio, tight
binding, Molecular Dynamics (MD) and equivalent continuum
mechanics methods [4] are the most popular computational
solutions to simulate and predict the properties of nanostructures.
The ab initio and MD simulations are limited to the atomic scale
because of the huge amount of computations, and thus many
researchers have focused on the continuum mechanics based or
other equivalent models. The molecular structural mechanics
(MSM), proposed by Li and Chou [5], is a recently developed
method which has been regarded by many researchers as a conducive method due to its simplicity and excellent efficiency. This
method considers the nanostructure as a space frame so that the
bonds between atoms are modeled as load-bearing beam members. By making a linkage between the structural and molecular
mechanics, the sectional properties of the equivalent beams are
obtained. Tserpes and Papanikos [6] employed a finite element
model based on MSM to identify the thickness and stiffness