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The idea of using carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as masks against irradiation has recently emerged, because of the region of a given material covered by a CNT can be protected from the effects of irradiation, creating nanowires. In this case, it is interesting to know in detail the number of generated recoils and their energy. In order to obtain these data, we simulate the irradiation of CNTs with carbon ions using a molecular dynamics code. To describe the interaction between carbon ions we use the Brenner potential joined smoothly to the Universal ZBL potential at short distances. We have analyzed the energy distributions of the carbon atoms emerging from the CNT for single projectile irradiation with incident energies from 30 eV to 5 keV. Our results show that the number and the energy of the recoil carbon atoms emerging from the CNT increases with the projectile incident energy. In average, each projectile with incident energy of 1 keV produces ∼3.6 recoils, which have a mean energy of 150 eV, while projectiles with 5 keV produce ∼7 recoils with a mean energy of 400 eV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]