Correlating thermal conductivity of carbon fibers with mechanical and structural properties

Abstract

Thermal conductivity of carbon fibers (CFs), being one of the important properties, is not easily quantified due to practical difficulties in measuring it. We suggest a universal correlation between the thermal conductivity of CFs and their electrical and mechanical properties in order to estimate it without direct measurement. Crystalline structural information did not show a clear correlation with thermal conductivity, especially for commercially available polyacrylonitrile- or isotropic pitch-based CFs that have less than a few nanometers of La and Lc. However, in a correlation between tensile modulus and thermal conductivity, there are three distinct regions and two properties increase with a different inclination in each region. We envisage tensile modulus to be utilized to estimate thermal conductivity without a direct measurement for all kinds of CFs.