Credit: Carlos Jones/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy
From left, Amit Naskar, Ngoc Nguyen and Christopher Bowland in ORNL’s Carbon and Composites Group bring a new capability—structural health monitoring—to strong, lightweight materials promising for transportation applications. The spools contain fibers from various stages within the carbon fiber production process. Bottles contain neat epoxy resin (white) and nanoparticle-loaded epoxy (gray) in which fiber tows will be dipped and dried to create a thin coating on the fibers. Testing ten concentrations of nanoparticles on coated fiber, the researchers found an optimum concentration that increased mechanical strength and enhanced structural health monitoring sensitivity.