Electrical conductivity and self-heating improvement of carbon fiber composite using functionalized graphene nanoplatelets

The electrical conductivity of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Epoxy Composite (CFRE) is poor and need more improvement to be used in more applications such as deicing processes. Functionalized Graphene Nanoplatelets (FGNP) are used in present study to improve and enhance the electrical conductivity of CFRE by coating on its top surface. The results show that the electrical conductivity of CFRE is increased significantly by 11 times with percentage of improvement of 1,110 %. The effect of Joule heating in CFRE/FGNP specimen is also studied. The results show that the self-heating of CFRE is improved after coating it with FGNP. The self-heating of CFRE/FGNP specimen becomes more efficient and homogeneous, reaching high levels of temperature, more than CFRE neat at the same applied voltage. Tensile test is also performed by applying axial tensile load on the CFRE/FGNP specimen to investigate the effect of tensile load on its electrical conductivity. Therefore, it is found that the electrical resistivity of CFRE/FGNP is increased by increasing the applied tensile load.