A 3-D Printed Continuous Carbon Fiber-Reinforced Composite for Highly Effective Microwave Shielding

The focus of this letter is on a thin, lightweight, and highly effective microwave shielding composite material reinforced by long continuous fibers, which can be easily fabricated with 3-D printing technique. Numerous long continuous carbon fibers are put into a bundle, then many bundles are parallelly arranged in a periodic way, and then embedded into the matrix material to form a single layer. Multiple layers are stacked up one over the other to produce the laminated composite with fiber bundles in each layer orientated into different directions. Numerical investigations have been carried out to discuss various factors which influence the shielding effectiveness, and highly effective shielding is achieved by the two-cross-layer composite. It is easily fabricated via 3-D printing technique, and experimental results are obtained based on square waveguide device to demonstrate the numerical results.