PSI - Issue 37

Dayou Ma et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 37 (2022) 105–114 Ma et. al./ Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2019) 000 – 000

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4. Results and discussion 4.1 Initial electrical property

In this section, the electrical model mentioned above was used to study the effect of the maximum polar angle on the electrical conductivity of the nanocomposites. Nanocomposites with 0.5 wt.% were considered to assess the current numerical method. The relative properties are shown in Table 1 and Table 2. The size of the electrical RVE should be set slightly larger than the length of CNT in order to get a stable result and high computational efficiency. Therefore, the lateral size of the electrical RVE cube is 5 µm.

Table 1. properties of the MWCNT used in the present study Parameter Description

/ ∙ −3 / ∙ −1 /eV

Value

∆ ´

Density

2.6

Electrical conductivity

5000

Height of barrier

1

/nm

Average length of CNT

5000 13.5

/nm

Diameter of CNT

Number of tunneling channels Van der Waals separation distance Cut-off distance in the tunneling effect

450

/ Å /nm

3.4 1.4

E /GPa

Elastic modulus

2000

Table 2. Properties of the epoxy used in the present study Parameter Description

/ ∙ −3 / ∙ −1 E /GPa

Value

1.14 ~ 10 −11 3.0

Density

Electrical conductivity

Elastic modulus Poisson’s ratio

µ

0.3

(a) (b) Fig. 7 Comparison of the electric conductivity between numerical results and experimental data (a); agreement on electrical conductivity between simulated and experimental results (b)