Carbon fibers

[2] These properties have made carbon fiber very popular in aerospace, civil engineering, military, motorsports, and other competition sports.

For example, when permeated with a plastic resin and baked, it forms carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer (often referred to as carbon fiber), which has a very high strength-to-weight ratio and is extremely rigid although somewhat brittle.

Carbon fiber-reinforced materials are used to make aircraft and spacecraft parts, racing car bodies, golf club shafts, bicycle frames, fishing rods, automobile springs, sailboat masts, and many other components where light weight and high strength are needed.

[5] In 1879, Thomas Edison baked cotton threads or bamboo slivers at high temperatures carbonizing them into an all-carbon fiber filament used in one of the first incandescent light bulbs to be heated by electricity.

[6] In 1880, Lewis Latimer developed a reliable carbon wire filament for the incandescent light bulb, heated by electricity.

[7] In 1958, Roger Bacon created high-performance carbon fibers at the Union Carbide Parma Technical Center located outside of Cleveland, Ohio.

In the early 1960s, a process was developed by Dr. Akio Shindo at Agency of Industrial Science and Technology of Japan, using polyacrylonitrile (PAN) as a raw material.

The high potential strength of carbon fiber was realized in 1963 in a process developed by W. Watt, L. N. Phillips, and W. Johnson at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, Hampshire.

The process was patented by the UK Ministry of Defence, then licensed by the British National Research Development Corporation to three companies: Rolls-Royce, who were already making carbon fiber; Morganite; and Courtaulds.

A 1970 joint technology agreement allowed Union Carbide to manufacture Japan's Toray Industries product.

Morganite decided that carbon-fiber production was peripheral to its core business, leaving Courtaulds as the only big UK manufacturer.

During the 1960s, experimental work to find alternative raw materials led to the introduction of carbon fibers made from a petroleum pitch derived from oil processing.

The tow is a bundle of thousands of continuous individual carbon filaments held together and protected by an organic coating, or size, such as polyethylene oxide (PEO) or polyvinyl alcohol (PVA).

Reinforced carbon-carbon (RCC) consists of carbon fiber-reinforced graphite, and is used structurally in high-temperature applications.

The fiber also finds use in filtration of high-temperature gases, as an electrode with high surface area and impeccable corrosion resistance, and as an anti-static component.

[14] The increasing use of carbon fiber composites is displacing aluminum from aerospace applications in favor of other metals because of galvanic corrosion issues.

[19] Using this composite material in the transportation infrastructure, especially for airport pavement, decreases some winter maintenance problems that lead to flight cancellation or delay due to the presence of ice and snow.

Passing current through the composite material 3D network of carbon fibers dissipates thermal energy that increases the surface temperature of the asphalt, which is able to melt ice and snow above it.

[22] A common method of manufacture involves heating the spun PAN filaments to approximately 300 °C in air, which breaks many of the hydrogen bonds and oxidizes the material.

[23] The oxidized PAN is then placed into a furnace having an inert atmosphere of a gas such as argon, and heated to approximately 2000 °C, which induces graphitization of the material, changing the molecular bond structure.