Analyzing carbon-fiber composite materials with equivalent-layer models

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of equivalent-layer models for the analysis of carbon-fiber composite materials. In this paper, we present three different models for the electromagnetic characterization (effective material properties) of fiber composites that are commonly used in aircraft and EMC/EMI shielding materials. These three models represent various orders (or levels) of detail in the fiber composite structure and, hence, capture various physical aspects of the composite. These models can be used to efficiently calculate the reflection and transmission coefficients, as well as the shielding effectiveness, of these fiber composites. We compare results of the reflection coefficient and shielding effectiveness obtained from these effective-property models to results obtained from a full numerical solution based on the finite-element (FE) method of the actual periodic fiber composite. We show that, as expected, as more of the geometric detail of the fiber composite is captured with the different models, the upper frequency limit of validity increases.