Coupled electrical-thermal finite element analysis (FEA) models are widely adopted to analyze the thermal ablation damage of carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) caused by lightning, but it is still difficult to analyze the ablation due to its complex space geometry. According to the principle of computerized tomography (CT), tomographic images of FEA models' temperature fields with different thicknesses were obtained to calculate the mass loss and compare the damage morphology. The four areas including Area 0, Area I, Area II, and Area III; were separated from the temperature fields in terms of different vaporization and pyrolysis temperature ranges of carbon fiber (CF) and resin matrix. Ablation mass losses were calculated by pixel statistics and tomographic intervals, which were consistent with the experimental results. The maximum ablation area of unprotected CFRP was found on the tomography images of 50 μm rather than the surface by comparing tomographic images with different thickness due to the influence of the thermal radiation, but this effect was not found in CFRP protected by copper mesh. Some other phenomena, including continuous evolutions of ablation areas and the influence of the intersection angle on the direction of the ablation extension, were also discovered.
Keywords: carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP); computerized tomography (CT); finite element analysis (FEA); lightning strike; thermal ablation.