Abstract
In this work, the thermal expansion properties of carbon nanotube (CNT)-reinforced nanocomposites with CNT content ranging from 1 to 15 wt% were evaluated using a multi-scale numerical approach, in which the effects of two parameters, i.e., temperature and CNT content, were investigated extensively. For all CNT contents, the obtained results clearly revealed that within a wide low-temperature range (30°C ~ 62°C), thermal contraction is observed, while thermal expansion occurs in a high-temperature range (62°C ~ 120°C). It was found that at any specified CNT content, the thermal expansion properties vary with temperature - as temperature increases, the thermal expansion rate increases linearly. However, at a specified temperature, the absolute value of the thermal expansion rate decreases nonlinearly as the CNT content increases. Moreover, the results provided by the present multi-scale numerical model were in good agreement with those obtained from the corresponding theoretical analyses and experimental measurements in this work, which indicates that this multi-scale numerical approach provides a powerful tool to evaluate the thermal expansion properties of any type of CNT/polymer nanocomposites and therefore promotes the understanding on the thermal behaviors of CNT/polymer nanocomposites for their applications in temperature sensors, nanoelectronics devices, etc.
Highlights
As technology and modern industry has developed, reinforced composite materials, such as particle- or shortfiber-reinforced composites and long-fiber-reinforced or sandwich laminates, have been widely applied in the aerospace, construction, transportation, machinery, chemical, and other industries
To investigate the thermal expansion properties of CNTreinforced nanocomposites, numerical simulations based on a sequential multi-scale approach were conducted on two types of microstructural models, a uni-directional model in which carbon nanotube (CNT) were uni-directionally aligned within epoxy and a multi-directional model in which the CNTs were randomly oriented within the epoxy
Uni-directional models Firstly, we investigated the influences of temperature and CNT content on the thermal expansion properties of CNT/epoxy nanocomposites by varying the temperature from 30°C to 120°C and CNT content from 1 to 5 wt%
Summary
As technology and modern industry has developed, reinforced composite materials, such as particle- or shortfiber-reinforced composites and long-fiber-reinforced or sandwich laminates, have been widely applied in the aerospace, construction, transportation, machinery, chemical, and other industries. CNT-reinforced nanocomposite is a multiphase material, and its external macro-physical properties. There has been extensive research on the mechanical, thermal, and electrical properties of CNT-reinforced nanocomposites. The thermal properties [1,2,3] and electrical properties of CNT-reinforced nanocomposites [4,5] have been explored experimentally in some previous studies. Due to the complexity and variations of the CNT-reinforced composite microstructure, theoretical analyses and numerical simulation methods are common strategies to estimate composite physical properties. Diffusion and thermal expansion coefficients of CNT-reinforced nanocomposites have been studied through micromechanics models without sufficient atomic scale information [6] or molecular dynamics (MD) models with very high computational cost and complexity [7]
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