CNT Enabled Co-braided Smart Fabrics: A New Route for Non-invasive, Highly Sensitive & Large-area Monitoring of Composites

Abstract

The next-generation of hierarchical composites needs to have built-in functionality to continually monitor and diagnose their own health states. This paper includes a novel strategy for in-situ monitoring the processing stages of composites by co-braiding CNT-enabled fiber sensors into the reinforcing fiber fabrics. This would present a tremendous improvement over the present methods that excessively focus on detecting mechanical deformations and cracks. The CNT enabled smart fabrics, fabricated by a cost-effective and scalable method, are highly sensitive to monitor and quantify various events of composite processing including resin infusion, onset of crosslinking, gel time, degree and rate of curing. By varying curing temperature and resin formulation, the clear trends derived from the systematic study confirm the reliability and accuracy of the method, which is further verified by rheological and DSC tests. More importantly, upon wisely configuring the smart fabrics with a scalable sensor network, localized processing information of composites can be achieved in real time. In addition, the smart fabrics that are readily and non-invasively integrated into composites can provide life-long structural health monitoring of the composites, including detection of deformations and cracks.

Laser‐Induced Freestanding Graphene Papers: A New Route of Scalable Fabrication with Tunable Morphologies and Properties for Multifunctional Devices and Structures

“…The real‐time resistance of LIGP embedded in the prepreg was monitored during the whole curing process. Following our previous discoveries, the decay of resistance after initial ramping is attributed to cross‐linking reaction of resin, causing the alteration of conducting pathways in LIGP. As curing temperature varied from 100 to 140 °C, the resistance decay is monotonically accelerating, reflecting the in situ monitoring of curing for manufacturing quality assurance.…”

Carbon Nanomaterials Based Smart Fabrics with Selectable Characteristics for In-Line Monitoring of High-Performance Composites

“…Following established strategies of materials’ exfoliation [ 28 , 29 ], MWCNTs (300 mg) were sonicated in deionized water (100 mL) with 5 mL of Triton X-100 surfactant for 120 min, using a Ultrasonics FS-600N probe sonicator operated in a pulse mode (on 10 s, off 10 s), with the power fixed at 480 W. Following the same conditions as in the sonication process, the GO dispersion was prepared with 300 mg of GO powders in 100 mL of deionized water. Based on our previous works [ 10 , 26 ], a modified fiber winding and coating system was established, as shown in Figure 1 a, in which the fiber powertrain was made up of a stepping motor and multiple standing pulleys for CNT/GO bathing, aqueous cleaning, and thermal drying. After the coating process, the GO-coated fibers required an additional reduction procedure to form the RGO-coated fibers by dipping the fibers into a hydroiodic acid solution at 85 °C for 30 min.…”

“…Ali et al [ 23 ] exploited graphene-coated piezo-resistive fabrics for monitoring the process of liquid composite molding. Our group recently enabled CNT and graphene thin films coated on reinforcement fibers to monitor and quantitatively analyze the composite manufacturing under both dry [ 24 , 25 ] and liquid [ 26 ] molding processes.…”

“…Summarizing the sensing performance of all the carbon nanomaterials-based sensors, it is surprising that the maximum resistance change has varied substantially from ~30% for graphene-based sensors [ 23 ] to ~1600% for CNT-based sensors [ 26 ]. To investigate the possible structure–property relationship, this paper focuses on the systematic analysis and comparison of three types of carbon nanomaterials-based sensors for monitoring the VARTM process of FRPs, namely, CNT-enabled fabrics (CNTF), reduced graphene oxide (RGO)-enabled fabrics (RGOF), and carbon fiber (CF)-enabled fabrics (CFF).…”

Mechanical and thermal behavior of hybrid glass/jute fiber reinforced composites with epoxy/polyester resin

“…To increase the curing time and maintain dimensional stability, nowadays advanced manufacturing methods replace traditional hand layup (HL) method. Markicevic et al [21] analyzed a vacuum assisted processing method, which allow for reducing resin percentage and thickness of composite parts [22] by increasing fiber volume fraction (V f ).…”