Carbon Fibers Electrical Measurements Pave Way for Lightning Strike Protection Technologies

Carbon fiber reinforced polymer composite structures are important in several industries, yet the electrical behavior of a composite is challenging to measure or predict because of the electrical conductivity of constituent carbon fibers and the composite’s complex hierarchical microstructure. In Journal of Applied Physics, researchers report the first direct measurement of the transverse electrical resistivity of a single carbon fiber. The researchers combined a precise sample preparation with a technique called the van der Pauw method to accomplish this challenging measurement.