Carbon nanotube web: A promising heating element for anti-icing/de-icing applications

A carbon nanotube (CNT) web is a continuous sheet or film of horizontally oriented CNTs obtained by drawing from specially grown CNT forests produced by chemical vapour deposition (CVD). As the CNTs are highly conductive and predominantly aligned along the draw direction, by controlling the aspect ratio of these CNTs and the number and orientation of stacked web layers, a tailored resistance may be achieved. Consequently, the CNT web is a promising choice for an electrothermal heater for anti-icing/de-icing applications. Layers of CNT web were compared to plies of carbon fibre (CF), as the heating elements within a glass fibre laminate assembly. Copper foil was used for distribution buses. The CNT web structure had a higher heating and cooling rate than the CF, which indicates that it needs less time and energy to reach the desired temperature whilst meeting the requirement of rapid de-icing. Moreover, the temperature variation across the CNT web specimen, as shown by IR imaging, was negligible compared with that for CF. In addition, compared with eight CF plies (0.314 g/cm2), a 20-CNT-web heater (37.8 μg/cm2) is more than 8000 times lighter. Consequently, owing to its rapid and uniform heating, as well as its negligible weight, CNT web is a promising heating element for anti-icing/de-icing applications. Both de-icing and anti-icing performance have been verified and composites with 30 or 40 layers of CNT web as the heating element showed rapid ice protection. © 2017 International Committee on Composite Materials. All rights reserved.