Document Type
Journal Article
Publication Title
Materials
ISSN
1996-1944
Volume
12
Issue
8
PubMed ID
31003531
Publisher
MDPI AG
School
School of Engineering
RAS ID
31277
Grant Number
ARC Number : IH140100018
Grant Link
http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/IH140100018
Abstract
Preparation of high-value pitch-based carbon fibres (CFs) from mesophase pitch precursor is of great importance towards low-cost CFs. Herein, we developed a method to reduce the cost of CFs precursor through incorporating high loading of coal tar pitch (CTP) into polyacrylonitrile (PAN) polymer solution. The CTP with a loading of 25% and 50% was blended with PAN and their spinnability was examined by electrospinning process. The effect of CTP on thermal stabilization and carbonisation of PAN fibres was investigated by thermal analyses methods. Moreover, electrospun PAN/CTP fibres were carbonised at two different temperatures i.e., 850 °C and 1200 °C and their crystallographic structures of resulting such low-cost PAN/CTP CFs were studied through X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Raman analyses. Compared to pure PAN CFs, the electrical resistivity of PAN/25% CTP CFs significantly decreased by 92%, reaching 1.6 kΩ/sq. The overall results showed that PAN precursor containing 25% CTP resulted in balanced properties in terms of spinnability, thermal and structural properties. It is believed that CTP has a great potential to be used as an additive for PAN precursor and will pave the way for cost-reduced and high-performance CFs.
DOI
10.3390/ma12081281
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Comments
Zabihi, O., Shafei, S., Fakhrhoseini, S. M., Ahmadi, M., Ajdari Nazarloo, H., Stanger, R., ... Naebe, M. (2019). Low-cost carbon fibre derived from sustainable coal tar pitch and polyacrylonitrile: Fabrication and characterisation. Materials, 12(8), Article 1281. Available here