Manufacturing of Smart Composite Aircraft Skins using 2D Material Coated Glass Fiber Reinforcements

Abstract

It has been extensively researched how to use the two-dimensional macromolecule graphene and its variants as a nanofiller in composites reinforced with carbon fiber. There has recently been potential in using the piezoresistive response of carbon nanomaterial-coated fabrics for structural health monitoring to provide affordable, precise, and dependable in-situ monitoring of the composites during their useful lifetime. Research has advanced from methods that disseminate graphene as a component for mixing throughout the composite material to more complicated examples where graphene is tightly bonded to fiber, matrix (as nanocomposites), or both. However, there are few types of research done about the influence that MXENE can make in the field of fiber-reinforced composites. Comparing rGO and MXENE, which were used to make smart skins by coating glass fabrics and embedding them to generate 2D-coated glass fiber polymer-reinforced composites, revealed a new, unexplored promise. Initially, GO and MXENE solutions fixed at a concentration of 5mg/ml were used to dip coat glass fabrics and hence use them to manufacture FRC via VARTM, utilizing carbon nanomaterial-coated fabrics. The initial resistance measurements showed that MXENE is highly conductive compared to rGO-based samples. Those samples were used later on to monitor their structure health via logging real-time resistance change along with load generation. In general, both 2D materials showed a comparable response in both tensile and 3-point bending tests, where the resistance was increased corresponding to the sample stress. During the cyclic tensile test, they both showed a proportional piezoresistive response to the stress, holding that MXENE showed more interruptions at the beginning of the test. The cyclic bending test showed a major difference between rGO and MXENE in sensing the values of shear stress, where rGO was providing a more or less good response to that type of stress, while MXENE showed no clear response to it. To ensure the accuracy and repeatability of the outcomes, the tests were repeated 3 times.

Date of Award	Dec 2022
Original language	American English
Supervisor	Rehan Umer (Supervisor)