Collaborating for cheaper carbon fiber

Oak Ridge National Laboratory and several industry partners work together to overcome the challenges to lower-cost carbon fiber.

Improving fuel economy during the next few decades will come down to developing fuel-efficient powerplants and lightweight structures. But if automakers are to build vehicle structures that meet increasingly stringent safety and quality standards while shedding significant mass, they will need to use carbon-fiber composite materials, which have a quarter the density of steel but several times its strength and equal stiffness.

Unfortunately, the very stuff of today's high-performance vehicles-racecars, exotic sports cars, jet fighters, spacecraft, and America's Cup sailboats-is still too costly for use in tomorrow's mass-produced vehicles, including range-challenged electric vehicles. Even the lower-quality industrial grades of carbon fiber that would meet the structural needs of future composite cars (tensile strength: 250 ksi, tensile modulus: 25 Msi, 1% ultimate strain) are too expensive at the current price of $10 to $20 per pound.