Development of Carbon/Carbon Composites with Through-Thickness Carbon Nanotubes for Thermal and Structural Applications
Abstract
Carbon/carbon composites offer lightweight thermal protection capable of producing excellent thermal materials. To further improve the thermal conductivity along the thickness direction and the interlaminar shear strength, we studied and demonstrated a novel method to stitch carbon nanotube yarns along the through-thickness direction of carbon fiber two-dimensional precursor felt perform to make novel 3D reinforced carbon/carbon (C/C) composites. By stitching nanotube yarns, high strength and thermal conductive CNTs were incorporated into the preform to significantly reinforce and improve thermal conductivity along the thickness direction. In this study, we illustrated the effectiveness of the stitching method to improve through-thickness conductivity (Kz) through both modeling estimations and experimental studies. The C/C composites with 1wt.%-8wt.% stitched nanotube yarns were fabricated using in situ densification process with T300 plane weave precursors. The through-thickness conductivity measurements results using a laser-flash method showed the Kz values of the C/C composites samples with stitched nanotube yarns had large variations. The C/C composite samples with 8wt.% stitched nanotube yarns showed a Kz as high as 24.5W/mK, which was approximately a 44 percent increase compared to 17 W/mK conductivity of the control sample. The Rule of Mixture estimated the conductivity of the nanotube yarns is possibly in the range of 110W/mK through 375W/mK. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Raman analysis also proved that the nanotubes survived after consolification and carbonization processing temperatures of 2500 to 2800 ?C. These results demonstrate the feasibility of using stitched nanotube yarns to effectively improve through-thickness conductivity.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 2008
- Accession Number
- ADA497482
Entities
People
- Chuck Zhang
- Zhiyong (richard) Liang