Effects of electrophoretic deposition process parameters on the mechanical properties of graphene carboxyl-grafted carbon fiber reinforced polymer composite

Carbon fiber (CF) modification by grafting of various graphene-based nanofillers (GBN) by electrophoretic deposition (EPD) technique was proven to be a successful technique to enhance the out-of-plane performance of carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites. Graphene carboxyl (G-COOH) grafting on carbon fiber by electrophoretic deposition (EPD) is a promising technique to improve the mechanical properties of CFRP composites. To our knowledge, there is a dearth of literature available on the effect of EPD process parameters on the mechanical behavior of modified CFRP composites. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of nanofiller concentration in the suspension, applied current, and the time of deposition during EPD on the mechanical behavior of nanophase CFRP composites, thus making it a novel work. With increasing concentration, interlaminar shear strength (ILSS) improved consistently and has shown a maximum enhancement of 24.7% than that of neat CFRP composite at 1.5 g/L nanofiller concentration, whereas flexural strength remained almost unaffected with varying concentration. On the contrary, variation of deposition current has affected the flexural strength but not ILSS. The maximum flexural strength was obtained at a deposition current of 5.0A with an improvement of 16.3% in comparison with neat CFRP samples. However, both flexural strength and ILSS of hybrid CFRP composites have shown improvement with increasing deposition time. At 60 min of deposition, ILSS and flexural strength have shown maximum improvements of 35.0 and 26.6%, respectively, when compared to control specimen. After evaluating the effect of process parameters future scope of the work involves the optimization of parameters for EPD of G-COOH. Fractographic analysis of the fractured samples was performed using scanning electron microscope (SEM) to apprehend prominent failure mechanisms. © 2020 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2020 , 137, 48925.