Charging behavior of chopped carbon fibers under high intensity electric fields

Abstract

In this study, we examined the charging behavior of chopped carbon fibers during electroflocking process, which is one of the key processes of the novel technique for fabricating conductive polymer composite films. Short carbon fibers (CF) during electroflocking were electrically charged by the combined effect of contact charging, corona charging and tribocharging. The specific charge built on CF surface was measured by using Faraday cup method. Specific charge increased not only with increasing electric field strength and potential impressed to mesh electrode as expected from theoretical considerations in literature. but with decreasing mesh opening size due to the improved contact charging condition. However, CF length was found unexpectedly to influence the amount of CF specific charge due to the agglomerated nature of CF flocks leading to the change in charging conditions.