Copper-coated carbon fibers have excellent conductivity and mechanical properties, making them a promising new lightweight functional material. One of the main challenges to their development is the poor affinity between carbon fiber and metals. This paper selects different carbon fibers for copper electroplating experiments to study the effect of carbon fiber properties on the interface bonding performance between the copper plating layer and carbon fibers. It has been found that the interfacial bonding performance between copper and carbon fiber is related to the degree of graphitization of carbon fiber. The lower the degree of graphitization of carbon fiber, the smaller the proportion of carbon atoms with sp2 hybrid structure in carbon fiber, the stronger the interfacial bonding ability between carbon fiber and copper coating. Therefore, carbon fiber with lower graphitization degree is conducive to reducing the falling off rate of copper coating and improving the quality of copper coating, and the conductivity of copper-plated carbon fibers increases with the decrease of graphitization degree of carbon fibers. The conductivity of copper-plated carbon fibers increases by more than six times when the graphitization degree of carbon fibers decreases by 23.9%. This work provides some benchmark importance for the preparation of highquality copper-plated carbon fibers.

Influence of carbon fibers on interfacial bonding properties of copper-coated carbon fibers
    Abstract
    1 Introduction
    2 Preparation of copper-plated carbon fiber
        2.1 Experimental material
        2.2 Experimental method
        2.3 Characterization
    3 Results and discussion
    4 Conclusion
    Acknowledgements 
    References

• Guodong Zhang(School of Mechanical, Electrical & Information Engineering, Shandong University, Weihai 264209, China)
• Weizhuang Yang(School of Mechanical, Electrical & Information Engineering, Shandong University, Weihai 264209, China)
• Jianan Ding(School of Mechanical, Electrical & Information Engineering, Shandong University, Weihai 264209, China)
• Mengxiang Liu(School of Mechanical, Electrical & Information Engineering, Shandong University, Weihai 264209, China)
• Kun Qiao(School of Mechanical, Electrical & Information Engineering, Shandong University, Weihai 264209, China, Fiber and Composite Engineering Center of Weihai Research Institute of Industrial Technology, Shandong University, Weihai 264211, China)
• Shengzong Ci(Fiber and Composite Engineering Center of Weihai Research Institute of Industrial Technology, Shandong University, Weihai 264211, China)
• Chengrui Di(Fiber and Composite Engineering Center of Weihai Research Institute of Industrial Technology, Shandong University, Weihai 264211, China)