As U.S. Army systems and vehicles become more dependent on electronic devices and subsystems, there is an increasing need for improving the mass- and volume-efficiency of energy storage components. The conventional approach for saving mass and volume is to increase component energy density. Alternatively, overall system weight can be reduced by replacing purely structural components, such as armor or frame members, with structures that also store energy. Specifically, we are developing capacitors that can also carry structural loads by intercalating glass fiber reinforced polymer dielectric layers with metallized polymer film electrodes. In previous work, we developed a metric, the multifunctional efficiency (MFE), for comparing various structural capacitor preparations and guiding multifunctional design. Modeling and characterization of fiber composite-based structural capacitors has shown that the MFE is sensitive to fiber shape, orientation, volume fraction, and dielectric constant. In this work, various dielectric materials are studied against this MFE metric and the effect of fiber properties and volume fraction on MFE is explored experimentally.

Date Published: 23 April 2008
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 6929, Behavior and Mechanics of Multifunctional and Composite Materials 2008, 69292L (23 April 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.785255

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6929:
Behavior and Mechanics of Multifunctional and Composite Materials 2008
Marcelo J. Dapino; Zoubeida Ounaies, Editor(s)