The Investigation of General Properties of Carbon Fiber (CF) Composites - Preliminary Study

Abstract

The most commonly used materials in the production of high-performance CFs are cellulose, polyacrylonitrile, and pitch. Polyacrylonitrile (PAN)-based fibers dominate the market (representing nearly 90% of total CF production), with some companies producing more than 10,000 tons per year. However, the current technique's high cost (the combined cost of the precursors and stabilization accounts for 70% of total CF synthesis cost) limits the technology's applicability. Carbon fiber manufacturing is characterized by a high energy demand due to long processing times and energy intensive thermal processes. PAN-based CFs are difficult to commercialize due to the time-consuming pre-oxidation step, which significantly raises the manufacturing cost. As a result, advanced processing technologies aimed at reducing CF production costs should be developed. They were consisting of a thin but strong crystalline filament of     carbon. This experimental study was to learn the mechanical properties of carbon fiber using Universal Testing Machine (UTM). There was a section where we made a phone case out of Polyacrylonitrile (PAN) carbon fiber and compared it to  other materials for phone cases. The phone cases of carbon fiber composites as the one examples of consumer product was made from the woven carbon fiber then was hardened by hard epoxy mixed with resin epoxy. Then, the phone cases were tested with UTM machine to compare the tensile strength and high modulus.   Other than that, there were few samples with different composition of PAN  powder mixed with different composition of sodium thiocyanate. The results of the testing shows that the carbon fiber had the high tensile strength than the other materials of phone cases which were silicone and thermoplastic polyurethanes (TPU). The microstructure of carbon fiber has a significant impact on its mechanical properties.