Tensile, Fatigue and Vibration Damping Characteristics of High Performance Glass Fiber Reinforced Composites with Aligned MWNTs

Abstract

In the present work multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs), the highly anisotropic, promising nanofillers used as additional structural reinforcement to improve the tensile, fatigue and damping capabilities of glass fiber reinforced composites (GFRP) for the Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) application. Further, the GFRP nanocomposites have been strengthened by making use of strong anisotropy of MWNT’s by aligning them on each layer of GFRP laminate. GFRP nanocomposites have been prepared for very low weight percentage (0.5 wt%) of MWNT, with alignment and without alignment. The alignment has been done with the newly developed in-house electrode-fixture assembly, which can be scalable to any size. The result shows that the alignment of MWNTs on GFRP lamina has a significant effect over GFRP lamina without MWNT alignment and the neat GFRP (without any nano reinforcements) without sacrificing any of the mechanical properties.