Highly thermal conductive sintered SiC fiber-reinforced 3D SiC/SiC composites; Experiments and finite-element analysis of the thermal diffusivity/conductivity

Yamada, Reiji; Igawa, Naoki   ; Taguchi, Tomitsugu; Jitsukawa, Shiro

SiC fiber-reinforced SiC composites (SiC/SiC) are considered an advanced structural material for blanket modules of a fusion reactor, which requires high thermal conductivity in order to keep thermal stresses in the material lower than the allowable design stress. The sintered SiC fiber recently developed has obtained high thermal conductivity, so it is highly expected that sintered SiC fiber-reinforced SiC/SiC composites would also show high thermal conductivity. In this study several types of 3D SiC/SiC composites were fabricated by either CVI or PIP method. The results of the thermal conductivity measurements show that the maximum thermal conductivity at room temperature was about 60 W/mK for CVI composites or 25W/mK for PIP ones. These values are considerably higher than those of non-sintered SiC fiber reinforced SiC/SiC composites, which indicates a possibility that the developed materials would be promising. The FEM thremal analysis shows the good agreement between the caluculated and experimental results.