Silicate conductive composites with graphite-based fillers

Electroconductive composites are modern materials that are commonly used in many industries such as construction industry and machine-building industry. For example, these materials can be useful as sensors for monitoring changes in constructions, shielding stray currents from electrification networks, shielding electromagnetic radiation in operating rooms, cathodic protection against moisture or overvoltage protection of buildings. The topic of this post is the research of electrically conductive silicate composites with graphite-based fillers. In this research will be tested composites with different ratio and types of graphite and monitor their electroconductive properties like impedance, and physical-mechanical properties like compressive and tensile strength. The post describes basic properties and interactions of silicate electrically conductive composites with graphite fillers. It was found that by adding 10 % wt. graphite into silicate composites, impedance is reduced by 50% and compressive strength by 40%. The flexural tensile strength depends mainly on the roughness of the particles, where the coarser flaky particles transfer the load better and increase the strength while very fine graphites reduce the flexural tensile strength. Furthermore, it has been found that very finely ground synthetic graphites are most suitable for achieving low impedance of composites