Graphene platelet reinforced copper composites for improved tribological and thermal properties

Mingxia Wu; Zhe Chen; Chunjie Huang; Kunlan Huang; Kyle Jiang; Jian Liu

doi:10.1039/c9ra07962a

Graphene platelet reinforced copper composites for improved tribological and thermal properties

RSC Adv. 2019 Dec 2;9(68):39883-39892. doi: 10.1039/c9ra07962a.

Authors

Mingxia Wu¹, Zhe Chen¹, Chunjie Huang^{1

2}, Kunlan Huang¹, Kyle Jiang³, Jian Liu¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Mechanical Engineering, Sichuan University Chengdu 610065 China liujian@scu.edu.cn.
² Institute of Mechanics, Materials and Civil Engineering, Université Catholique de Louvain 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve Belgium.
³ School of Mechanical Engineering, University of Birmingham Birmingham B15 2TT UK.

Abstract

In this work, investigations were conducted to evaluate a type of graphene platelet-reinforced copper (GPL/Cu) composite for enhanced tribological and thermal properties. The pin-on-disc (steel) results show that the wear loss and the friction coefficient of the composites decrease by nearly 80% and 70%, respectively, in comparison with those of pure Cu. Thermal conductivity of the composites initially improves substantially by approximately 30% with a slight loading of 0.25 vol% GPLs and decreases gradually with a higher content of GPLs. Microstructural analysis reveals that the enhancement in the tribological property is attributed to both the self-lubricating property of GPLs and grain refinement while the improvement in the thermal property is closely associated with the uniform dispersion of GPLs.