Lightning protection of carbon fibre reinforced plastics — An overview

Study on the Growth and Properties of Electrolessly Deposited Thin Copper Coatings on Epoxy-Based CFRP

“…Metal foils and meshes are very often attached to CFRP surfaces to overcome this problem, bringing a number of issues. The high price of these products, the high time consumption required for their application, and their complex reparation operations are the main drawbacks [3].…”

Enhancing the electrical conductivity of carbon fibre thin-ply laminates with directly grown aligned carbon nanotubes

“…Compared to pristine thin-ply, enhancement with directly grown CNTs increased the transverse conductance 20 and 30 fold in the epoxy and polypropylene composite materials, respectively. Conductivity of these composites was moderated by the increased sample thickness, particularly for the epoxy material, although it is anticipated that optimisation of fabrication will mitigate this issue.Although the increase in electrical conductivity is at least one order of magnitude more than what is reported in literature for conventional laminates, the level of conductivity obtained is still not sufficient to provide alone an adequate LSP[7,30] however it would substantially augment existing LSP technologies and form the basis for further improvements. The higher electrical conductivity could also be used to improve the shielding effectiveness (SE) and the Electro-Static Discharge (ESD) efficiency, and can also help to mitigate the effects of edge glow or thermal hot spots (due also to the consequent increase of transverse thermal conductivity that is not investigated here).The significant enhancement in transverse conductivity does not influence the longitudinal conductivity and hence the electrical anisotropy of the thin plies is drastically reduced.…”

“…It is well established that although carbon fibres are moderately conductive, their composites with non-conductive matrices are significantly less so. Thus the in-plane electrical conductivity of a unidirectional (UD) CFRP, in the fibre direction, is at least three orders of magnitude less than aluminium (10 7 S/m) [7] and five orders of magnitude less in the transverse direction (between 0.1 and 10 2 S/m). Consequently, to improve the Lightning Strike Protection (LSP) and…”

Subgridding Boundary Conditions to Model Arbitrarily Dispersive Thin Planar Materials

“…Consequently, their shielding effectiveness (SE) against electromagnetic (EM) fields and lightning strikes is reduced. For this reason, manufacturers usually include conductive layers of metallic meshes, foils, honeycomb structures, and so on [1]. A common characteristic of these materials is that they are often electrically thin and present complex frequency-dependent profiles of their scattering parameters (S-parameters) [2]- [10].…”