Improvement on Electric Conductivity of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic Composites

Carbon fiber reinforced plastic(CFRP) composite have a lot of advantages such as being light, but its electrical performance is not enough. In this paper, in view of the uniaxial electrical anisotropy of CFRP composite, an aluminum layer is coated on a specially formulated CFRP composite sheet by the method of chemical plating. The microstructure and conductivity of CFRP composite sheet and CFRP composite sheet coated with aluminum layer are analyzed. The direct current surface contact resistance method and the rectangular waveguide transmission reflection method were used to test their conductivity and shielding effectiveness. The results show that aluminum coating can improve the conductivity of CFRP composites sheet. The electromagnetic shielding effectiveness of carbon fiber composites sheet were improved by 40dB from 8.2GHz to 12.4GHz.