Conductive carbon loaded polymer film electrodes for pulsed power applications. Part II: determination and minimization of the contact resistance

Abstract

Electrically conductive polymer composites consisting of a nonconductive polymer matrix and conductive fillers, such as carbon black, are widely used. This contribution describes a newly developed measurement setup that has been built to investigate the specific electrical properties of polymer composite films for pulsed conditions in the microsecond (10-6 s) range. For an industrially available volume conductive polymer film (Carbostat) the contact resistivity to copper has been investigated. Also, three methods for minimizing the contact resistivity, namely pressing, gluing, and wetting, have been compared for a wide range of applied current densities.