Apparent thermal conductivity of PAN-based carbon fibre tow based on infrared thermography measurements

Abstract

Currently, the apparent thermal conductivity of carbon fibre (CF) is measured using contact- and noncontact-type thermal conductivity methods. The contact-type method exhibits measurement non-uniformity in the CF thickness direction that does not allow uniform sampling; the error occurrence rate is known to be high. Meanwhile, in the noncontact-type method, the fibre porosity and tow gap results in a lower accuracy and similarly high error occurrence rate. Therefore, this study aims to provide a quantitative method of measuring the thermal conductivity of polyacrylonitrile (PAN)-based 12 K CF tows with a filament diameter of 7 µm using Fourier’s law of conduction and a thermal imaging camera. This method is expected to overcome the limitations of the conventional contact- and noncontact-type techniques. Using the proposed method, the average thermal conductivity of the PAN-based 12 K CF tow was measured to be approximately 21.28 W/m·K.