Electrical Conductivity of Nickel Nanostrand-Polymer Composites

[Abstract] A microstructure-based model for predicting the effective electrical conductivity of nickel nanostrand reinforced polymer composites is developed by using the Voronoi tessellation technique and the resistor network theory. Voronoi diagrams with different degrees of cell shape irregularity (amplitude a) are generated by perturbing a regular packing of seeds to model the microstructures of nanostrand networks. Ten resistor networks are constructed for each type of nanostrand network samples (with the same value of a) to obtain the mean value and standard deviation of the effective electrical conductivity. Kallmes and Corte’s statistical model is employed to relate the utilized nanostrand volume fraction and the initial nanostrand volume fraction. The simulation results indicate that the effective electrical conductivity, on average, decreases as cell shapes become more irregular. The use of a regular hexagonal lattice can lead to a moderate improvement in the conductivity over that of a completely random network. The values of conductivity predicted by the current model are found to agree fairly well with existing experimental data and predictions based on the Monte Carlo technique. In addition, it is revealed that the polymer nanocomposites behave isotropically in terms of its electrical conductivity.