Graphene reinforced carbon fibers

Zan Gao; Jiadeng Zhu; Siavash Rajabpour; Kaushik Joshi; Małgorzata Kowalik; Brendan Croom; Yosyp Schwab; Liwen Zhang; Clifton Bumgardner; Kenneth R. Brown; Diana Burden; James William Klett; Adri C.T. van Duin; Leonid V. Zhigilei; Xiaodong Li

doi:10.1126/sciadv.aaz4191

Graphene reinforced carbon fibers

Zan Gao, Jiadeng Zhu, Siavash Rajabpour, Kaushik Joshi, Małgorzata Kowalik, Brendan Croom, Yosyp Schwab, Liwen Zhang, Clifton Bumgardner, Kenneth R. Brown, Diana Burden, James William Klett, Adri C.T. van Duin, Leonid V. Zhigilei, Xiaodong Li

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

121 Scopus citations

Abstract

The superlative strength-to-weight ratio of carbon fibers (CFs) can substantially reduce vehicle weight and improve energy efficiency. However, most CFs are derived from costly polyacrylonitrile (PAN), which limits their widespread adoption in the automotive industry. Extensive efforts to produce CFs from low cost, alternative precursor materials have failed to yield a commercially viable product. Here, we revisit PAN to study its conversion chemistry and microstructure evolution, which might provide clues for the design of low-cost CFs. We demonstrate that a small amount of graphene can minimize porosity/defects and reinforce PAN-based CFs. Our experimental results show that 0.075 weight % graphene-reinforced PAN/graphene composite CFs exhibits 225% increase in strength and 184% enhancement in Young's modulus compared to PAN CFs. Atomistic ReaxFF and large-scale molecular dynamics simulations jointly elucidate the ability of graphene to modify the microstructure by promoting favorable edge chemistry and polymer chain alignment.

Original language	English
Article number	aaz4191
Journal	Science Advances
Volume	6
Issue number	17
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaz4191
State	Published - Apr 2020

Funding

We thank the staff members at the University of Virginia NMCF for electron microscopy technical support, as well as H. Luo from G. M. Geise's group and M. Diasio from D. L. Green's group in Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Virginia for TGA and viscosity test support. We thank X. Xiao (Brookhaven National Laboratory) for performing the tomography experiments. Financial support for this study was provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, Vehicle Technology Office (DE-EE0008195). B.C. is supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program under grant no. 1315231. This research used Beamline 18-ID (FXI) of the National Synchrotron Light Source II, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Brookhaven National Laboratory under contract no. DE-SC0012704. Computational support is provided by the NSF through the extreme science and engineering discovery environment (MSS180008).

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title = "Graphene reinforced carbon fibers",

abstract = "The superlative strength-to-weight ratio of carbon fibers (CFs) can substantially reduce vehicle weight and improve energy efficiency. However, most CFs are derived from costly polyacrylonitrile (PAN), which limits their widespread adoption in the automotive industry. Extensive efforts to produce CFs from low cost, alternative precursor materials have failed to yield a commercially viable product. Here, we revisit PAN to study its conversion chemistry and microstructure evolution, which might provide clues for the design of low-cost CFs. We demonstrate that a small amount of graphene can minimize porosity/defects and reinforce PAN-based CFs. Our experimental results show that 0.075 weight % graphene-reinforced PAN/graphene composite CFs exhibits 225% increase in strength and 184% enhancement in Young's modulus compared to PAN CFs. Atomistic ReaxFF and large-scale molecular dynamics simulations jointly elucidate the ability of graphene to modify the microstructure by promoting favorable edge chemistry and polymer chain alignment.",

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AU - Croom, Brendan

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AU - Zhang, Liwen

AU - Bumgardner, Clifton

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AU - Klett, James William

AU - van Duin, Adri C.T.

AU - Zhigilei, Leonid V.

AU - Li, Xiaodong

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Graphene reinforced carbon fibers

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