Improving electrical and thermal surface properties of polymer composite materials

Abstract

The use of new composite materials has increase in the last decades due to the possibility to achieve great properties with the combination of two or more materials. A great example is carbon fibre reinforce polymers (CFRPs), which are intensively use in many applications for their good strength to weight ratio. These materials are apparently an ideal component for aircraft industrial; however, the electrical and thermal conductivity they exhibit makes it unsuitable for certain applications like lightening strike protection. To achieve better performance on CFRPs, it is common to metallise the surface with aluminium, copper or others conductive materials. In this project two different approaches have been compared: joining, with adhesive tape, and coating, with electrochemical deposition and sputtering. The electrical conductivity of the samples, before and after the metallization, has been studied with the 4-probes method and we have studied the influence of thickness on thermal and electrical conductivity.