Shielding Effectiveness of Conductive CFRP with Copper-Plated Fibre

Use of conductive fillers in CFRP is a common method to increase their electrical conductivity. Additionally using copper-plated fibre as inclusions is known to increase electrical conductivity even further. Investigations on the shielding effectiveness (SE) of CFRPs made with a) conventional resin, b) conductive fillers in resin and c) copper-plated fibre in conductive resin is carried out. SE is measurement using two different procedures viz., a) free-space measurement and b) shielded box enclosure measurement. A dependence on the number of ply and hence on the thickness of the CFRP is observed in the comparison of the SE performance of the different samples. The thickness of CFRP plays a significant role even while using copper-plated fibre, indicating absorption loss to be a major contribution in achieving higher SE in CFRPs.