Effect of processing routes on mechanical and thermal properties of copper–graphene composites

In this paper, copper–graphene composites were fabricated by using two different processing routes (ball milling (BM) and ultrasonication) followed by spark plasma sintering. Vickers hardness and anisotropic thermal conductivity of the composites were measured and observed that ultrasonicated fabricated composites gave better result compared with BM composite and even from pure copper. The hardness values obtained for ultrasonicated copper–graphene composite were 69 HV (57% higher) and thermal conductivity 387 W/m K (13% higher) by using only 0.5 wt-% of graphene, while for pure copper the values were 44 HV and 341 W/m K. The value of anisotropic thermal conductivity ultrasonicated composites was also 1.97 which is much higher than pure copper 0.94.