The influence of fiber orientation on electromagnetic shielding in liquid-crystal polymers

The influence of conductive carbon-fiber orientation and weight percentage on the electromagnetic (EM) shielding effectiveness (SE) in liquid-crystal polymer (LCP) composites was investigated experimentally and theoretically. The experimental results show that the SE of LCP composites with longitudinal fiber orientation is higher than random fiber orientation under the same weight percentage of carbon fibers filled. This is because longitudinal fiber orientation is parallel to the electric field of the incident EM wave, and most of the energy of the incident wave is reflected by the longitudinal fiber. In comparison with nylon66 composites, the SEs of LCP composites with longitudinal fiber orientation are also higher than nylon66 composites with the same content of carbon fibers. Furthermore, the SE of 20% conductive carbon-fiber-filled LCP composites was measured to be 50 dB at a frequency of 0.3 GHz and 53 dB at 1 GHz, which is at least 10 dB higher than that of nylon66 composites. The SE predicted by theoretical models and measured by experiments was in good agreement for carbon-fiber-filled LCP composites of longitudinal and random fiber orientations.