Carbon Fibers structural models compared

Heat conductivity of composite materials are severely and adversely affected by structural defects in the material. These defects are due to voids, uneven distribution of filler, agglomerates of some materials, unwetted particles, etc. Figure 15.18 shows the effect of filler concentration on thermal conductivity of polyethylene. Graphite, which is a heat conductive material, increases conductivity at a substantially lower concentration than does quartz. These data agree with the theoretical predictions of model. Figure 15.19 shows the effect of volume content and aspect ratio of carbon fiber on thermal conductivity. This figure should be compared with Figure 15.17 to see that, unlike electric conductivity which does depend on the aspect ratio of the carbon fiber, the thermal conductivity is only dependent on fiber concentration and increases as it increases. 

As an example of the above statement. Fig. 17.3 contains the Nj adsorption isotherms for powder AC vidth different adsorption capacities [3]. These isotherms, compared with those in Figs. 17.1 and 17.2, clearly demonstrate that the adsorption isotherms do not permit neither to distinguish the ACF from the AC nor to deduce differences in the pore size distribution. However, the unique fiber shape and porous structure of the ACF are advantages that permit to deepen into the fundamentals of adsorption in microporous solids [31]. ACFs are essentially microporous materials [13, 31], with sht-shaped pores and a quite uniform pore size distribution [42, 43]. Thus, they have simpler structures than ordinary granulated ACs [31] and can be considered as model microporous carbon materials. For this reason, important contributions to the understanding of adsorption in microporous solids for the assessment of pore size distribution have been made using ACF [31, 33, 34, 39, 42-46], which merit to be reviewed. 

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