As the nano-motor becomes a mechanical reality, its prototype can be envisaged as nano-sized rotating machinery at a situation,albeit for different purposes, like that in the first half of the 20th century during which rotor dynamics has contributed toboosting machine power capacity. Accordingly, we take the benefit of hindsight to develop a classical framework of vibrationanalysis. Essentially, the equations of motion are formulated to cope with both the special carbon-nanotube properties and thefirst author’s previously developed spinning beam formalism, establishing a model satisfactorily verified by some availablemolecular dynamics (MD) data and classical spinning beam results extracted from the literature. The model is inexpensivebased on continuum mechanics as an alternative to the less-flexible MD method for simulating wave motion of the spinningsingle-walled carbon nanotube, yielding several interesting phenomena, including the fall-off and splitting of the wave charac-teristic curves and the unexpected gyroscopic phase property. Potential applications are proposed.
