Wenxiang Xu, Peng Lan, Yaqing Jiang
May 1, 2020
Citations
0
Influential Citations
35
Citations
Journal
Carbon
Abstract
Abstract Interphase configurations affect conductive properties of carbon fibrous composites (CFCs), specifically the percolation of interphase triggers the dramatic change of conductive properties. It has been a key but unresolved issue how to capture the percolation of soft interphase interacted by anisotropic-shaped carbon fibers and its quantitative effect on the conductivity of CFCs. This work proposes a theoretical framework for the accurate predictions of the excluded volume and percolation threshold of soft interphase and the effective conductivity of CFCs. This framework contains three theoretical models: (1) a coupling scheme between the second virial coefficient theory and Monte Carlo simulations for determining the excluded volumes; (2) an excluded-volume-based percolation model for obtaining the percolation threshold of soft interphase; (3) a continuum percolation-based micromechanical model (CPMM) for predicting the effective conductivity of CFCs with spherocylindrical carbon fibers of high volume fraction and their surrounding interphase percolation. Comparison against numerical and experimental data validates that the theoretical framework can well predict these properties of CFCs. This framework can be regarded as a general scheme that is readily applicable to other core-shell networks. Furthermore, we use the framework to probe various factors effects on the percolation threshold of interphase and electrical conductivity of CFCs.