Optical Black Coating on Carbon Fiber Reinforced Composite Sandwich Structure with Aluminum Honeycomb Core for Satellites Applications

The composite sandwich structure has been in use in space applications particularly for the satellite body because of its high strength to weight ratio coupled with excellent compressibility strength. In particular, there has been tremendous demand for honeycomb sandwich structures for satellite application in recent years. Currently, a major problem needs to be addressed concerning reflections from satellite structures which leads to capturing in-accurate data of celestial bodies by ground-based astronomy. In the light of the above, this paper focuses on the development of novel optical black coating on Carbon fiber reinforced composite sandwich structures with aluminum honeycomb core. A thin layer of Multi-Walled Carbon Nanotubes black coating was developed on the surfaces of Carbon fiber reinforced composite laminate of the sandwich structure using the Chemical Vapour Deposition technique, to provide a low reflective surface. A three-point bending test is performed for evaluating young’s modulus of the composite sandwich structure and the Compressibility test is carried out to determine the wall buckling of the Aluminum honeycomb core. The compressibility test is simulated in ANSYS with the same boundary conditions as the practical tests. To sum up, the results obtained from ANSYS and the practical test of compression are compared and analyzed. The surface structures of the optical black coating are imaged using a scanning electron microscope to determine the diameter of Multi-Walled Carbon Nanotubes to evaluate the effects of the reflection based on the density of the optical black coating furthermore optical properties such as reflectance will be reported in this paper.