Carbon fibers

Lore & Background

In the early 1960s, Dr. Akio Shindo at the Agency of Industrial Science and Technology of Japan developed a process using polyacrylonitrile (PAN) as a raw material, producing carbon fiber containing about 95% or more carbon after heat treatment. Thompson Fiberglas Co. developed a process for producing carbon fiber using rayon as a precursor, though the carbon content was not as high as 99% in that early work. Watt, L. N. Phillips, and W. Johnson at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, Hampshire. This process was patented by the UK Ministry of Defence and licensed to Rolls-Royce, Morganite, and Courtaulds. During the 1960s, experimental work led to carbon fibers made from petroleum pitch, containing about 85% carbon. Since the late 1970s, further types of carbon-fiber yarn entered the global market, offering higher tensile strength and higher elastic modulus. Jacob Lahijani invented balanced ultra-high-Young's-modulus and high-tensile-strength pitch carbon fiber used in automotive and aerospace app

Reader's Guide

Carbon fibers have become a cornerstone of modern composite materials, enabling significant weight reduction and performance improvements across multiple industries. Their high strength-to-weight ratio and stiffness have made them essential in aerospace for aircraft and spacecraft parts, in motorsport for racing-car bodies, and in consumer goods such as golf-club shafts, bicycle frames, and fishing rods. The material's high-temperature tolerance also allows its use in reinforced carbon-carbon composites for extreme environments. Despite these advantages, adoption has been limited by cost; carbon fiber may be 10–12 times more expensive than steel for automotive applications, though this premium has decreased from an estimated 35 times in the early 2000s. The development history shows a progression from early carbon filaments for light bulbs to high-performance fibers derived from rayon, PAN, and pitch, with key contributions from researchers in the United Kingdom, Japan, and the United States. The failure of Rolls-Royce's carbon-fiber compressor blades due to bird impact illustrates the challenges of introducing new materials into critical applications.

Did You Know?

• Dr. Akio Shindo's PAN-based process in the early 1960s yielded carbon fibers with about 95% carbon content, not 55%.

Material Properties and Crystal Architecture

Carbon fibers are extraordinarily thin strands, measuring only 5 to 10 micrometers across, composed predominantly of carbon atoms. What sets them apart is the internal arrangement of those atoms: they bond into crystals that align roughly parallel to the fiber's long axis. This parallel crystal structure is what grants each individual filament an exceptional strength-to-volume ratio, meaning the fiber is remarkably strong for its minuscule size. The resulting material exhibits high stiffness, high tensile strength, a superior strength-to-weight ratio, resistance to chemical attack, tolerance of extreme temperatures, and minimal thermal expansion. These combined traits explain why engineers across aerospace, civil engineering, military programs, and competitive sports gravitate toward carbon fiber as a structural material. The significant trade-off is cost: compared to alternatives such as glass fiber, basalt fiber, or plastic fibers, carbon fiber carries a substantially higher price tag, which confines its use to applications where those performance advantages are genuinely indispensable.

From Light Bulbs to High-Performance Filaments

The story of carbon fiber stretches back further than most people realize. In 1860, Joseph Swan first produced carbon fibers for use in light bulbs, and by 1879 Thomas Edison was carbonizing cotton threads and bamboo slivers at high temperatures to create all-carbon filaments for early electric incandescent bulbs. Lewis Latimer followed in 1880 with a reliable carbon wire filament. However, the modern high-performance era truly began in 1958 when Roger Bacon at Union Carbide's Parma Technical Center near Cleveland, Ohio, heated rayon strands until they carbonized—though the result contained only about 20 percent carbon, making the process inefficient. A breakthrough arrived in the early 1960s when Dr. Akio Shindo at Japan's Agency of Industrial Science and Technology developed a method using polyacrylonitrile as a precursor, yielding fibers with roughly 55 percent carbon content. That same year, Richard Millington at H.I. Thompson Fiberglas Co. patented a process producing 99 percent carbon fiber from rayon, strong enough for composite reinforcement and high-temperature service.

Composites: Where Carbon Fiber Truly Shines

On its own, a carbon fiber is a remarkably thin filament, but its full potential emerges when it is combined with other materials. The most common approach involves impregnating the fibers with a plastic resin and baking the mixture, producing what is widely known as carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer. This composite achieves an outstanding strength-to-weight ratio and extreme rigidity, though it carries a degree of brittleness. An alternative route composites carbon fiber with graphite to create reinforced carbon-carbon materials, prized for their exceptional heat tolerance. In practice, thousands of individual filaments are bundled into a tow, which can be used directly or woven into fabric before being integrated into a composite matrix. The end result appears in an astonishing range of products: aircraft and spacecraft structural parts, racing-car bodywork, golf-club shafts, bicycle frames, camera tripods, fishing rods, automobile springs, and sailboat masts—essentially any component where minimizing weight while maximizing strength is the governing design priority.

Global Competition and Corporate Upheaval

The commercial landscape of carbon fiber has been shaped by fierce international rivalry and corporate turbulence. In 1963, researchers at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, Hampshire, developed a high-potential-strength process patented by the UK Ministry of Defence and licensed to Rolls-Royce, Morganite, and Courtaulds. Rolls-Royce made headlines in 1968 fitting a Hyfil carbon-fiber fan assembly into the Conway jet engines of the Vickers VC10, then attempted to enter the American market with carbon-fiber compressor blades in its RB-211 engine. Bird-impact damage and other setbacks were so severe that the company was nationalized in 1971, and its carbon-fiber plant was sold to form Bristol Composite Materials Engineering. Meanwhile, Japan surged ahead in the late 1960s, with Toray, Nippon Carbon, Toho Rayon, and Mitsubishi all developing their own production. Morganite eventually exited the field as peripheral to its core business, and Courtaulds ceased production in 1991 after its water-based process proved vulnerable to impurities. By the late 1970s, advanced yarns like Toray's T400 and M40 entered the global market, and carbon fiber from Toray, Celanese, and Akzo migrated from secondary to primary structural roles in aircraft built by McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, Airbus, and United Aircraft Corporation.