Highly flexible and ultra-thin Ni-plated carbon-fabric/polycarbonate film for enhanced electromagnetic interference shielding

By Xing Di, Longsheng Lu, K. Teh, Z. Wan, Yingxi Xie, Yong Tang. Carbon, 2018

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We report in this work a highly flexible, mechanically robust, and ultra-thin Ni-plated nonwoven carbon fabric/polycarbonate (CF/PC/Ni) film that exhibits outstanding electromagnetic interface (EMI) shielding performance. This composite film is fabricated through a four-step process — fabrication of nonwoven carbon fiber/polypropylene/polyethylene (CEF-NF) fabric, catalytic seeding and sensitization, electroless Ni plating, and lamination with polycarbonate. The as-fabricated ultra-thin (0.31 mm) CF/PC/Ni film exhibits superior EMI shielding effectiveness (EMI-SE) of 72.7 dB, which is close to 3× that of an identical film with no Ni plating (25 dB)—demonstrating Ni plating can substantially improve the EMI shielding performance. Compared with similar lightweight EMI-shielding materials, this CF/PC/Ni film shows a superior EMI-SE at lower density and smaller thickness (1376.1 dB cm2 g−1). 40 min of Ni plating (yielding a Ni thickness of 1.075 μm), followed by 2 MPa of laminating pressure at 190 °C of laminating temperature were found to provide optimal EMI shielding performance. Based on reliability study, the CF/PC/Ni film retains 96.36% of its EMI-SE after 5000 cycles of mechanical bending and 50 h of heating. Therefore, the CF/PC/Ni film exhibits outstanding flexibility, good mechanical strength, and remarkable electrical properties, making it an excellent EMI shielding material.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8f62f0056ec1905084fdf8801d8befb8b37cc90e