Chapter 1. The Kinetics and Mechanism of Graphitization, D. B. Fischbach. Chapter 2. The Kinetics of Graphitization, A. Pacault. Chapter 3. Electronic Properties of Doped Carbons, Andre Marchand. Chapter 4. Positive and Negative Magnetoresistances in Carbon, P. Delhaes. Chapter 5. The Chemistry of the Pyrolytic Conversion of Organic Compounds to Carbon, E. Fitzer, K. Muller and W. Schaefer.
The most remarkable feature of this volume is that about three-fourths of its total content is devoted to the fundamental processes of the formation of carbon and graphite, i.e. to carbonization and graphitization.
Chapter 1 by Fischbach, is mainly based on his own research work. First, he gives a brief review of the recent concepts of disordered carbon structures and a chronological review of kinetic studies. He argues that the graphitization process is a disorder-order transformation involving annealing and healing of structural defects, and that in general graphitization is a thermally activated kinetic process with a well-defined and physically significant activation energy. Based on his analysis of the kinetics of graphitization of pyrolytic carbon, he extends the analysis to conventional petroleum cokes. The values of activation energy of graphitization reported by many authors vary from less than 100 kcal/mol up to 300 kcal/mol. The differences in these values are mostly due to the difficulties of accurate measurements and of precise control of the heattreatment temperature and also are caused by the differences in the methods of analysis. However, most of recently reported values concentrate around 200kcal/mol. Since the value of 260 kcal/mol resulting from his own work is supported by a more recent work of Murty, Biederman and Heintz and since it corresponds to the value of the activation energy of self-diffusion, he suggests that graphitization is most probably a process of mass-transport self-diffusion by one or more point defect mechanisms.
Recent results on high temperature deformation of carbon and graphite and on high pressure