Abstract: Microwave heating has a lot of advantages compared with the traditional heating method, such as heating fast, heating uniformly and so on. It is promising to apply microwave curing technology to the repair of composite materials. In this paper, composite laminated plates with prefabricated defects was repaired by microwave scanning equipment and the microwave scanning repair process as well as the mechanical properties of samples after repair was studied. The results show that the curing process with an input DC current of 300 mA possess high curing efficiency. At the same time, the curing product is of good mechanical properties, so we select this process as microwave scanning repair process eventually. When the repairing sample adding no covering ply, the tensile properties retention rate is relatively high, while the bending properties retention rate is relatively low. Tensile strength and modulus retention rate are 89% and 92.7%, respectively. Bending strength retention rate loading on bending surface and back surface are 74.9% and 77.5%, respectively. When the repairing sample adding covering plies, the tensile and bending properties of the sample are improved, and the tensile strength and modulus remain rate increased to 98.7% and 95.4%, respectively. The bending strength loading on bending surface and back are increased to 96% and 94.4%, respectively. Compared with the thermal curing repair, microwave scanning repair can save about 70% of the repair time and has a higher repairing efficiency.

Key words: composite, microwave scanning repair, tensile property, flexural property