Carbon fiber is a high-performance fiber with excellent mechanical properties, which is about 5 to 10 μm in diameter and mainly composed of carbon atoms. Alfa Chemistry supplies a wide range of carbon fiber products to provide you with advanced material solutions.
Typical Categories
- PAN-Based Carbon Fiber
PAN-based carbon fibers are produced from PAN-based precursor fibers. Acrylic fibers with acrylonitrile content above 85% have been found to be ideal precursors. The figure below shows the chemical structure of a PAN homopolymer first introduced as a carbon fiber precursor material. PAN has two desirable properties: first the high carbon content (67.9 %) that leads to a high carbon yield (50-55 %) and second its tendency to establish a ladder structure when heat treated in air. [1]
- Pitch-Based Carbon Fiber
Pitch-based carbon fibers are derived from pitch-based precursors. Pitch was selected as one of the early candidates for carbon fiber precursors due to its high carbon yield (85%). The main advantage of using pitch as a precursor is the production of ultra-high modulus carbon fibers because the graphite crystallite size is significantly larger. However, the graphitic nature of the pitch-based precursors reduced the compressive and transverse properties of the resulting carbon fibers. - Activated Carbon Fiber
Activated carbon fiber (ACF) is a relatively novel fibrous carbon material, which has the advantages of high porosity, high volume capacity, excellent bulk density, fast adsorption kinetics, and good porous storage capacity. - Others
Other carbon fiber production precursors also include cellulose precursors, phenolic precursors, and so on.
Features
- High tensile strength (2∼7 GPa)
- Notable compressive strength
- High Young’s modulus (200∼900 GPa)
- Low density (1.75∼2.20 g/cm3)
- Low thermal expansion
- Excellent electrical and thermal conductivity (~800 Wm-1K-1)
- Ultimate chemical stability
- High temperature resistance
- Good fatigue resistance
- Excellent wear resistance
Applications
- Battery Application
The application of carbon fibers as electrode materials in batteries has been widely studied, such as lithium-ion batteries, lithium-sulfur batteries, sodium-ion batteries, and vanadium redox flow batteries. The effects of carbon fibers and their composites on battery performance were summarized by Shengnan Yang et al. [2]
- Composite Materials
Based on the above-mentioned advantages of carbon fiber, such as high specific tensile strength, high modulus, and excellent wear resistance, carbon fiber occupies an important position in reinforcing advanced composite materials. The obtained composite materials are widely used in aviation, deep sea development, wind power generation, automobiles, construction engineering, sports and leisure and other industrial and civil fields. - Environment and Energy
The general properties of ACF enable it to be used in a variety of environmental and energy applications, including applications in CO2 capture, volatile organic compound removal, wastewater treatment, and energy. For example, some efforts have been made to utilize ACF materials to eliminate volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as benzene, toluene, xylene, (BTX) organic compounds, etc., especially from enclosed environments. [3]
References
- Kamyar Shirvanimoghaddam, et al. Composites Part A: Applied Science and Manufacturing, 2017, 92, 70-96.
- Shengnan Yang, et al. Chemical Engineering Journal, 2020, 384, 123294.
- Muhammad Faheem Hassan, et al. Journal of Analytical and Applied Pyrolysis, 2020, 145, 104715.
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