Electrically Conducting Structural Foams
The subject technology is the development of a special material for functional core material in sandwich designs for EMI shielding structural applications like electronic enclosures.
The present technology involves tailoring hollow glass microspheres embedded polymeric syntactic foams for electrical conductivity applications by incorporation of certain lightweight conductive in critical quantities, so as to ensure the initiation of the electrical percolation phenomenon in the bulk materials. These additives not only render the resultant composite foams with sufficient electrical conductivity, but also reinforce them structurally. Such electrically conducting lightweight structural foams can be tuned for a wide range of densities, thermal with standability, mechanical and electrical properties by judicious selection of material compositions and chemistries. Further, these foams can also be subjected to near net shape fabrication, even for components with critical contours.