Materials for aircraft fuel tanks characterized for charge generation from flow electrification with Jet A-1 fuel

Abstract

Materials used for aircraft fuel tanks are most often metallic. But with technological advances and outbreaks, some new carbon-based composites have emerged that show equivalent thermo-mechanical performance for lower weight and cost. Thus, such materials could become attractive alternatives for fuel tanks of new generations of aircrafts. However, the introduction of new composites justifies new inquiries and new analyses on flow electrification. As part of these analyses, this paper provides a synthesis of results, from an experimental study of streaming current measurements, aiming at characterizing charge generation processes at the interface between aviation Jet A-1 kerosene and aircraft fuel tank materials, for both metallic and carbon-based composite configurations. This characterization, done for different conductivities of Jet A-1 fuel, went through determining two key macroscopic parameters: ρ wi , the charge density for a fully developed Electrical Double Layer (EDL) and K which is a coefficient linked to the dynamics of the chemical reactions creating the charge in the EDL. The experimental results show that the charging levels are somewhat affected by the type of material involved (composite walls covered by a dielectric layer may produce up to twice the charge produced by metallic walls) and strongly influenced by the fuel's electrical conductivity. Moreover, in the case of multilayer material configurations, only the most external layer directly in contact with the fuel actually influences the charge generation, independently of the nature of the sublayers underneath.