A Precious Metal-Free Electroless Technique for the Deposition of Copper on Carbon Fibers
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RODUCTION
CARBON fibers are used widely in metal-matrix, ceramic-matrix, and polymer-matrix composites due to their good mechanical properties.[1–3] In recent years, the study of Cu-coated carbon fibers has attracted broad attention in the science and business field. The Cu coating layer enables the carbon fibers to avoid the harmful interaction with the matrix and to improve the wetting ability at the interface between the carbon fiber and the matrix at high temperature, leading to substantial improvement in the performance of the composite.[4–7] The coatings can be deposited on fibers using various methods such as electroless deposition, electroplating, vapor deposition, and plasma spraying.[8–10] However, the coating layer is not uniform and it is difficult to control the thickness of the coating layer due to its rapid deposition rate of the solution by electroplating. Electroless deposition is usually used for thinner coating, and the copper layer is uniform and fine grained; additionally, the electroless process costs less than vapor deposition.[11] Usually, chemical deposition of Cu or Ni requires precious metals such as Pt or Ag as the catalyst core.[12–14,20,21] In this article, a novel, simple, and low-cost technique for chemical deposition of Cu on the surface of carbon fiber is studied, which is aimed at avoiding the use of precious metals and replacing them by Ni. The emphasis of this study is to modify the surface morphology of carbon fibers and obtain smooth Cu coatings on carbon fibers. DEHUI CHE, Postdoctoral Candidate, GUANGCHUN YAO, Professor, and ZHUOKUN CAO, Lecturer, are with the School of Materials and Metallurgy, Northeastern University, Shenyang, Liaoning 110819, P.R. China. Contact e-mail: [email protected] This article was a presentation from the symposium ‘‘Coatings for Structural, Biological, and Electronic Applications’’ which was published in the November 2011 issue of the journal. Manuscript submitted December 22, 2009. Article published online November 18, 2011 4194—VOLUME 43A, NOVEMBER 2012
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MATERIALS AND METHODS
A. Materials Carbon fibers used in this work are 12 K tows manufactured by Shenyang Anke Co. Ltd. (Shenyang, China). The chemical composition and physical properties of carbon fiber are shown in Table I. It should be noted that the diameter of carbon fibers is 7 lm and the tensile strength is 3.5 GPa. B. Electroless Plating Procedure The setup for preparation of copper plating of carbon fiber is shown in Figure 1. The stirring device promotes rapid exhaust of reaction gas from the solution. In order to avoid the gas holdup, the outside surface of the fibers cannot be coated with Cu. Carbon fibers were heated to various temperatures of 573 K (300 °C), 673 K (400 °C), and 773 K (500 °C) in air for 30 minutes. Surface topography of the treated carbon fibers was characterized by SSX-550 scanning electron microscope. The fibers were sequentially treated in boiling 40 pct HNO3 for 10 minutes and 0.2 pct NaOH solution for 5 minutes. After being washed, the fibers were immersed in NiSO4 soluti
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