Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The current and future generations of aircrafts and helicopters are increasingly made of composite materials for structural weight savings. However the main drawback of replacing their aluminum counterpart is an important decrease of the electrical conductivity which lead to serious consequences for the aircraft and the electronic systems lightning strike protection (LSP). A popular protection approach is to bond a copper mesh on the outer surface of the composite structure using a polymeric resin. This method provides a good LSP but this surface material is heavy which counterbalances the utilization of composite materials to save weight in the first place. In this project, we propose to develop a lightweight surface material or coating for composite structures in order to improve their electrical conductivity for efficient lightning strike protection while featuring the desired characteristics: high electromagnetic protection, high mechanical resistance, good environmental protection, flexible manufacturability and moderate costs. The advanced material investigation will cover the design of nanocomposites (i.e., mixture of polymer with nanoscopic scale particles for enhanced electrical conductivity), the utilization of cold spray technologies (i.e., deposition of thin metallic film) and the fabrication of self-supporting graphene scaffolds (i.e., nanomaterial with high conductivity). These potential solutions will be electrically characterized with different non- and destructive tests including the testing under high currents using a custom-made screening setup. The coating and film prototypes will also be tribomechanically characterized to assess their performance with respect to the other design criteria such as the mechanical resistance, the environmental protection and manufacturability. This multidisciplinary CRIAQ project will be in collaboration between an academic research team from three different institutions and three industrial partners (Bombardier Aerospace, Bell Helicopter Textron Canada Ltd and 3M). This project is directly related to the development of safer public transportation and environmentally friendly ""greener"" airplanes has supported by the Canadian and Quebec governments.