Modelling the electro-mechanical properties of PPy/epoxy conductive composites

G. Catalanotti*, A. Katunin

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

11 Citations (Scopus)
203 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Modern trends in materials dedicated for aircraft applications are focused on development of highly multifunctional materials that allow not only to carry mechanical loading, but also to possess several other types of functionality, e.g. be thermal resistant, electrically conductive, etc. The material of such a type, with a possibility of conducting electrical current without loss of mechanical properties is the main topic of presented research results. The work presented here deals with the determination of the overall stochastic mechanical and electrical properties of a blend of polypyrrole (PPy) and epoxy. The material properties are obtained applying appropriate periodic boundary conditions (PBCs) to the representative volume elements (RVEs) of the material nano-structure. A strategy to model numerically the electrical percolation network in the framework of Finite Element Method (FEM) is proposed and discussed. Electrical and mechanical properties of the material are calculated as a function of the filler volume fraction. Finally, the numerical results are compared with experiments found in literature and an overall good agreement is found.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)88-97
Number of pages10
JournalComputational Materials Science
Volume113
Early online date08 Dec 2015
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15 Feb 2016
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • A. Conductive blends
  • B. Representative volume elements (RVEs)
  • C. Continuum percolation
  • D. Electro-mechanical properties
  • E. Polypyrrole (PPy)

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Materials Science
  • General Chemistry
  • General Computer Science
  • General Physics and Astronomy
  • Computational Mathematics
  • Mechanics of Materials

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