Carbon nanotube (CNT) yarns exhibit tensile strengths comparable to or even exceeding those of high-strength polyacrylonitrile-based carbon fibers. However, the mechanisms governing the tensile failure of CNT yarns embedded in polymer matrices remain poorly understood. Therefore, in this study, the tensile failure mechanisms of CNT yarns embedded in polymer matrices were investigated using synchrotron radiation X-ray computed tomography (XCT) combined with digital volume correlation (DVC) and Raman spectroscopy upon tensile loading. DVC revealed heterogeneous strain fields within the surrounding epoxy matrix, including localized strain concentrations associated with damage sites and strain perturbations in apparently intact regions where no damage was detectable via 0.50 μm/pixel XCT. Subsequent 32 nm/pixel XCT confirmed the presence of previously undetected damage. Raman spectroscopy further revealed the heterogeneous axial-strain distributions and persistent load-bearing capacities of the damaged regions of the yarn. Therefore, load transfer between the CNT bundles progressively deteriorated in a spatially distributed manner rather than via damage localization into a single dominant fracture site. The combined observations indicated that the tensile failure of the polymer-embedded CNT yarns was governed by the progressive accumulation of spatially distributed inter-bundle damage and associated deterioration of load transfer between the CNT bundles. This failure mode fundamentally differed from that of a conventional brittle fiber, in which failure is typically characterized by localized fracture, followed by recovery of axial stress and subsequent fragmentation. These findings provide mechanistic insights for developing failure and strength prediction frameworks for hierarchical CNT-yarn composite systems.


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