| Carbon composite materials are often considered for the replacement of aluminium alloys in the design of aircraft fuselage skins. The main advantages regarding this trend come from the primary weight reduction involved with carbon composites and other related mechanical advantages. Currently, aircraft fuselage skins are thoroughly used for the electrical current return network and the actual project focuses on the characterization of some electrical and thermal properties of carbon composites in the context of aircraft current return network studies.;Measurements of electrical resistivity of a given sample are done with respect to the ambient temperature. The results show a negligible dependence between these two parameters. This experimentation also allows confirming the hypothesis that carbon composites can not be used, directly, as primary current return media in the design of electrical current networks.;In order to better understand the electrical current distribution through carbon composites, the project measures the electrical voltage distribution on the surface and within a given composite sample. These results are also used in computing the resistance between the electrical contacts and the composite, which is found to be highly dependent on the torque applied to the electrical contact and the state of the composites surface.;It is found that the thermal response of the composite to electrical current is highly dependent on the current amplitude and its duration. These tests allow evaluating a safety threshold, giving an operational thermal limit for the material. It is shown that the highest level of generated heat comes from the vicinity of the electrical contacts compared to the body of the sample.;As a complement to this work, the computation of lumped parameters for any given multi-conductor configuration is explored by programming a MATLAB-COMSOL script. This project is ongoing, but the code is reported in an Appendix for continuation in a near future. The main interest of this code resides in the description of a simple algorithm to be implemented in a MATLAB-COMSOL environment for computating capacitive lumped parameters. |
