As the starting polymeric hydrocarbon, known as a
"What we're showing is that by adding carbon nanotubes, we reach this plateau region earlier," Stein says. The findings were reported Aug. 22 in the Journal of Materials Science online. The co-authors were Stein, former Materials Processing Center-Center for Materials Science and Engineering (MPC-CMSE) Summer Scholars Ashley L. Kaiser (2016) and Alexander J. Constable (2015), postdoc Luiz Acauan, and the senior author, professor of aeronautics and astronautics Brian L. Wardle. Kaiser is now a graduate student in Wardle's lab.
Improving manufacturability
"This work has the interesting finding that nanostructures assist in fabricating [and] manufacturing the glassy carbon composites," Wardle says. "Early lessons with nano-materials broadly showed that nanostructures impede manufacturing, however, we are finding a theme across several research areas that when controlled, the nanostructures can be utilized to enhance manufacturing, sometime significantly. While the nanostructures—here, aligned carbon nanotubes—are valuable as reinforcement to the glassy carbon, they can also be utilized to improve the manufacturability. Ashley and Itai are taking this work even further to test the limits."
Crystallite size is strongly tied to hardness, which is a measure of mechanical performance such as strength and toughness. It is one of the most important properties of the glassy carbon material.
"If you look at the hardness normalized by the density, we previously found that the first point in the plateau region is the best point, because there the glassy carbon material is the least dense and hardest," Stein says.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-carbon-nanotubes-temperature-glassy.html#jCp
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