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Carbon fiber reinforced Plastics are materials with high strength and stiffness at low weight compared to metals. These properties make the materials ideal candidate for structures in aerospace applications, where they are often used under bending conditions. Due to the strongly anisotropic composition the CFRP typically fail in compression by fiber buckling. In order to improve this weakness, nanotube and nanofiber reinforced matrix was used to build CFRP. Four-point bending tests showed that stiffness and strength could be improved by the fillers, whereas negative influence was found on fracture energy.

Carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRPs) are promising composite materials for high-performance and lightweight applications, gaining increasing interest in aerospace and automotive industries. Epoxy thermosets are frequently used as polymer matrices of CFRPs, which are usually responsible for failure of the composite. In this work different types of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and carbon nanofibers (CNF) are added to the epoxy resin to improve mechanical properties of the whole CFRP composite. The dispersion of the fillers on a three-roll mill (TRM) is shown comparing their dispersion behavior in the resin. Results of increased modulus and strength of the hierarchical composite in four-point bending tests are presented.