PAN-based carbon fiber is a synthetic fiber with polyacrylonitrile (PAN) fiber as its precursor, which has excellent strength. Alfa Chemistry offers PAN based carbon fibers to meet your lightweight structural composite needs.
Introduction
When the fibers are heat-treated from 1000°C to 1500°C and the proportion of graphite in the fiber varies from 0% to 100%, they are called carbon fibers. Various carbon fiber precursor materials have thus been derived, such as polyacrylonitrile (PAN), viscose rayon and petroleum pitch. Among them, compared with other materials, PAN has the advantages of not changing the original structure, good orientation, and high carbon content. Carbon fibers are derived from the pyrolysis of polymer fibers. The PAN precursor fibers were further processed by stretching, stabilization, carbonization, and graphitization to obtain carbon fibers.
Properties Of PAN-Based Carbon Fiber
PAN-based carbon fiber has the performance characteristics of high carbon yield, large stiffness, capability of inter-chain reactions, high melting point, higher compressive strength, and low spinnability. Carbon fiber reinforced composites are stronger and lighter than conventional material structural parts. PAN-based carbon fiber has a wide range of applications in automotive, aerospace, construction, medical, sports equipment, electronics and other fields. [1]
PAN-Based Precursor
PAN has two desirable properties as a carbon fiber precursor: firstly, a high carbon content (67.9%) resulting in high carbon yield (50-55%), and secondly, a tendency to build a ladder structure when heat-treated in air. Melt and wet spinning of PAN used to be a challenge due to the low degradation temperature and low solubility of PAN polymer.
One approach used to eliminate these problems is to polymerize acrylonitrile with other monomers to moderate the strong hydrogen bonding of the nitrile groups and allow molecular structure orientation of the long polymer chains.
- The commonly used comonomers are methyl acrylate (MA), methyl methacrylate (MMA), methacrylic acid (MAA) and itaconic acid (IA).
- The commonly used solvents are dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO), dimethylformamide (DMF), dimethyl acetate (DMAc), and sodium thiocyanate.
Manufacturing Process
In the manufacturing process of PAN-based carbon fiber, its production process is long and the process route is complicated. The process flow is roughly shown in the figure. The manufacturing process of PAN-based carbon fiber can be roughly divided into the preparation of PAN spinning solution, the preparation of PAN precursor and the preparation of PAN-based carbon fiber.
The defects brought by each step in the production process will be inherited to the next step and finally to the final carbon fiber, resulting effect on the performance of carbon fiber. Therefore, it is necessary to comprehensively consider the entire process flow to determine the appropriate process parameters. Among them, the quality of PAN precursor depends on different process parameters, such as the composition of spinning solution, the temperature and concentration of coagulation bath.
Reference
- Rahul D. Sandhanshiv, et al. IOP Conf. Ser.: Mater. Sci. Eng. 2020, 810 012014.
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