Literatura académica sobre el tema "Electrically conductive thermoplastic composites"

Electrically conductive polymer composites, i.e. polymers filled with conductive fillers, may display a broad range of electrical properties. A rational design of fillers, filler surface chemistry and filler loading can tune the electrical properties of the composites to meet the requirements of specific applications. In this dissertation, two studies were discussed. In the first study, highly conductive composites with electrical conductivity close to that of pure metals were developed as environmentally-friendly alternatives to tin/lead solder in electronic packaging. Conventional conductive composites with silver fillers have an electrical conductivity 1~2 orders of magnitude lower than that of pure, even at filler loadings as high as 80-90 wt.%. It is found that the low conductivity of the polymer composites mainly results from the thin layer of insulating lubricant on commercial silver flakes. In this work, by modifying the functional groups in polymer backbones, the lubricant layer on silver could be chemically reduced in-situ to generate silver nanoparticles. Furthermore, these nanoparticles could sinter to form metallurgical bonds during the curing of the polymer matrix. This resulted in a significant electrical conductivity enhancement up to 10 times, without sacrificing the processability of the composite or adding extraneous steps. This method was also applied to develop highly flexible/stretchable conductors as building block for flexible/stretchable electronics. In the second study, a moderately conductive carbon/polymer composite was developed for use in sensors to monitor the thermal aging of insulation components in nuclear power plants. During thermal aging, the polymer matrix of this composite shrank while the carbon fillers remained intact, leading to a slight increase in filler loading and a substantial decrease in the resistivity of the sensors. The resistivity change was used to correlate with the aging time and to predict the need for maintenance of the insulation component according to Arrhenius’ equation. This aging sensor realized real-time, non-destructive monitoring capability for the aging of the target insulation component for the first time.

Recent advances in manufacturing of multifunctional materials have provided opportunities to develop structures that possess superior mechanical properties with other concurrent capabilities such as sensing, self-healing, electromagnetic and heat functionality. The idea is to fabricate components that can integrate multiple capabilities in order to develop lighter and more efficient structures. In this regard, due to their combined structural and electrical functionalities, electrically conductive carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) matrix composites have been used in a wide variety of applications in most of which they are exposed to unwanted impact-like mechanical loads. Experimental data have suggested that the application of an electromagnetic field at the moment of the impact can significantly reduce the damage in CFRP composites. However, the observations still need to be investigated carefully for practical applications. Furthermore, as the nature of the interactions between the electro-magneto-thermo-mechanical fields is very complicated, no analytical solutions can be found in the literature for the problem. In the present thesis, the effects of coupling between the electromagnetic and mechanical fields in electrically conductive anisotropic composite plates are studied. In particular, carbon fiber polymer matrix (CFRP) composites subjected to an impact-like mechanical load, pulsed electric current, and immersed in the magnetic field of constant magnitude are considered. The analysis is based on simultaneous solving of the system of nonlinear partial differential equations, including equations of motion and Maxwell's equations. Physics-based hypotheses for electro-magneto-mechanical coupling in transversely isotropic composite plates and dimension reduction solution procedures for the nonlinear system of the governing equations have been used to reduce the three-dimensional system to a two-dimensional (2D) form. A numerical solution procedure for the resulting 2D nonlinear mixed system of hyperbolic and parabolic partial differential equations has been developed, which consists of a sequential application of time and spatial integrations and quasilinearization. Extensive computational analysis of the response of the CFRP composite plates subjected to concurrent applications of different electromagnetic and mechanical loads has been conducted. The results of this work verify the results of the previous experimental studies on the subject and yield some suggestions for the characteristics of the electromagnetic load to create an optimum impact response of the composite.