Study On Preparation And Properties Of Carbon Fiber Electrothermal Composite Materials

As a kind of significant reinforcement for composite materials, carbon fiber has excellent mechanical properties, such as high specific strength and specific modulus. Carbon fiber also has good electric and thermal conductivity. Carbon fiber has been widely used in many engineering fields due to the combination of structural and functional properties. With these outstanding properties, carbon fiber can be applied to wind turbine blades both for structural and electrothermal materials, which shows great advantages in building anti-icing and de-icing function for wind turbine blades. In this paper, the electric and thermal conductivity properties were utilized to meet the anti-icing and de-icing requirements of wind turbine blades. The feasibility of carbon fiber serve for electro thermal anti-icing composite materials was investigated.According to the structural feature of wind turbine blade, several typical laminations were designed for the electrothermal composite materials, including carbon fiber lamination, carbon fiber/ glass fiber hybrid lamination and sandwich structure. Vacuum infusion molding process and vacuum bag molding process were adopted to fabricate the designed electrothermal composite materials.Static resistance property of the electrothermal composite materials was investigated. The size effects of the resistance property of the electrothermal composite materials were characterized. The resistance of the carbon fiber composites increases linearly with length and decreases nonlinearly with width and thickness of lamination. The results are very important for electrothermal composite materials circuit design.The influence of temperature and deformation on resistance of the carbon fiber electrothermal composite materials was studied by experiment. The electrothermal behavior of the carbon fiber electrothermal composite materials was also characterized by experiment. It showed that the temperature increased quickly while the electro thermal composite materials was electrified and reached a stable temperature plateau. While the electric voltage increased, the stable temperature plateau was correspondingly increased;however, time to reach the stable temperature plateau is still kept as the same.Experiments were carried out to characterize the mechanical performance and intrinsic damage of the carbon fiber electrothermal composite materials experienced high temperature to low temperature circulations. It is found that the mechanical properties reduced slightly by no more than 3%. No obvious damage was observed by supersonic non-destructive detection. It shows that the carbon fiber combines very well with the glass fiber lamination and foam sandwich structure, which indicates that carbon fiber electrothermal composite materials are excellent in bearing the temperature variation.