Hi,

Could you advise on the most suitable epoxy adhesive for bonding carbon fibre laminate to aluminium (1000 series).
And what is the best way to prepare the surfaces for joining.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards,
Allan

I'd also like an answer to this

JZX World Forums

what you want to know? you want laminate? as we done on fiberglass on any plastic also on wood and aluminium.

Epoxy will bond to almost anything. It's more of a glue than it is a resin. Possibly the most reactive one. A polyurethane adhesive might work better though. I use the Black Mamba range from SAF. The Teroson products are also good, although somewhat confusing as its such a large range.
Being the EC forum, it would be rude not to recommend their range of adhesives:

https://www.easycomposites.co.uk/adhesives

To get the best adherence to aluminium, key the surfaces with something like 100 grit and bond the laminate as soon as possible to minimize the creation of aluminium oxide.

I would recommend our ET538 Honeycomb Bonding Epoxy Adhesive as it is very good for bonding aluminiums to carbon, however all the epoxy based adhesives will bond aluminium to carbon no problem with slight property differences dependant on the adhesive type.

Warren Penalver
Easy Composites / Carbon Mods - Technical Support Assistant

This might be impractical but might be useful to know. For high-end applications (eg aircraft), metal to matting bond has to be special. Metal expands at about 5 X the carbon-carbon surface.
You take existing matting and coat with a thin epoxy layer, add another single layer of cloth. That is then cured at about 500 deg C in low oxygen. It leaves a porous surface - we're talking a tenth of a millimetre depth.
The fibres of that surface are coated with metal, but not so the holes are filled. There are various ways to do this, such as a type of electroplating. Then the surface can be brazed onto the metal.
This gives a stronger and stiffer bond than the metal.

(I'm looking for a shortcut!)

Hi, I have experimented with bonding CF to both Aluminium and Titanium .. In both cases the specialized products like the Permabond stuff gives the best adherence, for the least effort..

With ordinary laminating epoxy from EC, I did get just as good adhesion, by "sanding" the epoxy into the alu/Ti surface.

Simply by coating a cleaned piece of alu with the resin, then using 100 grit paper to sand through the still wet epoxy resin, then adding a new thin coat on top, and then laminating CF onto this using normal procedures for CF lamination.

This ensures that the epoxy is in direct chemical contact with non-oxidised metal.

Using a "special blend" of "Nanocyl"  Epocyl carbon nanotube epoxy resin and normal Resin increased the strenght even further. 

Thermal expansion will be a problem, causing distortion in an Alu-CF laminate.  This can cause problems with the aluminium honeycomb core as well, if both sides of the sandwich is not "glued up" in one go, at the same temperature......

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