Technique Uses Carbon Nanotube Film to Heat and Cure Composite Materials
Engineering360 News Desk | April 15, 2015Aerospace engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a carbon nanotube film that can heat and solidify a composite without using ovens.
A new film of carbon nanotubes cures composites for airplane wings and fuselages, using only 1% of the energy required by traditional, oven based manufacturing processes. Credit: Jose Luis Olivares MIT
Currently, composite materials used in fuselages and aircraft wings are manufactured in large, industrial-sized ovens, heated up to 750 degrees Fahrenheit. Using this new approach, the heated film stimulates the polymer to solidify by being wrapped over a multilayer polymer composite when connected to an electrical power source.
This “out-of-oven" approach can be a more cost-effective method of manufacturing almost any industrial composites, according to the MIT team.
"Typically, if you're going to cook a fuselage for an Airbus A350 or Boeing 787, you've got about a four-story oven that's tens of millions of dollars in infrastructure that you don't need," says Brian Wardle, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT.
"Our technique puts the heat where it is needed, in direct contact with the part being assembled. Think of it as a self-heating pizza … instead of an oven, you just plug the pizza into the wall and it cooks itself."
Wardle and his team first developed a technique to create a film of aligned carbon nanotubes composed of tubes of crystalline carbon, standing upright like trees in a forest. They then used a rod to roll the "forest" flat, creating a film of aligned carbon nanotubes. The team experimented to learn how hot they could go, eventually testing the film's ability to stand temperatures in excess of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Currently, they are working with industrial partners to explore possibilities of scaling up the technology to manufacture composites large enough to make airplane fuselages and wings.
"There needs to be some thought given to electroding and how you're going to actually make the electrical contact efficiently over very large areas," Wardle says. "You'd need much less power than you are currently putting into your oven. I don’t think it’s a challenge, but it has to be done."
The researchers published their results in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.