Deposition kinetics and mechanism of pyrocarbon for electromagnetic-coupling chemical vapor infiltration process

Abstract

Abstract Although the electromagnetic-coupling chemical vapor infiltration (E-CVI) has been proven of a high-efficiency technique for producing carbon fiber reinforced pyrocarbon (PyC) matrix (C/C) composites, a deep understanding of the deposition kinetics and mechanism of PyC matrix is still lack. In this work, a deposition model with uniform electric field but gradient magnetic field was set up by using unidirectional carbon fiber bundles as the substrates to investigate the deposition kinetics and mechanism. Meanwhile, the polarizability, and the chemical adsorption and dehydrogenation barriers of hydrocarbon were simulated based on the density functional theory (DFT) and the Climb-image nudged elastic band method, respectively. The E-CVI process exhibited extremely high PyC deposition rates of 8.7, 11.5, 16.5 and 22.7 nm/s at 700, 750, 800 and 850°C, respectively, together with a significantly low apparent activation energy of 57.9 kJ/mol within the first 5 min. The PyC deposited at different temperatures with different time shows a smooth laminar structure with low coherent length and graphitization degree. The theoretical calculation and simulation results indicated that the electrons existing on the carbon fibers and the accelerated motion of radicals with preferred orientation forced by the derived magnetic field have reduced the energy barrier for the deposition process, thereby resulting in low apparent activation energy and high PyC deposition rate. The results of this work may shed a light on how to better direct the preparation of C/C composites by E-CVI process with high quality and efficiency.