TechStuff Classic: The History of Carbon Fiber

Carbon fiber is an amazing material. Where did it come from? And were people really making it in the 19th century?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Be there and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio,
and I love all things tech. It is Friday, which
means it is time for a tech Stuff classic. This

(00:25):
classic episode originally published on June second, two thousand fourteen.
It is titled The History of Carbon Fiber, a truly
fascinating material that has lots of incredible uses and applications,
some of which I believe have been perhaps a bit

(00:45):
over hyped over the years, but that tends to be
the case with all things technology. Let's listen in carbon fiber.
Fascinating stuff it is. I didn't even realize how fascinating
it was until we in fact started doing this research.
And because as it is so fascinating, and since we
are splaying this into two episodes, we'll probably have to
look at other exotic materials in another one. Well, we'll

(01:07):
make some mention of stuff that is similar to what
carbon fiber is, but we're really going to focus on
carbon fiber because it's there's a lot there. Oh yeah,
there could have probably been way more than two episodes
about carbon fiber. If we had really gotten into gritty
details about about different uses for it and exactly if
we had gone into the history of this is the
first vehicle to use. If we had done that, this

(01:29):
would have been a three partter easily. But but if
you're not fans, we didn't go into that kind of
minute detail. We're going to tell you in this episode
about the history of developing carbon fiber. In our second
part we'll look more into how it's actually made and
the process that that you have to go through in
order to get a raw material to turn into carbon fiber,

(01:49):
and some of the challenges and benefits thereof. Yes, so, first,
what the heck is carbon fiber. It's a material made
up of thin strands of crystalline car been doctor, Well,
there you go. Episode over, Thanks guys. Yeah, but no,
we're gonna we're gonna give a little more detailed than that.
So the thickness of an individual strand of carbon fiber

(02:10):
can be thinner than a human hair by by many factors.
Oh yeah, and um, if you're wondering, yes, it is
in fact structurally similar to graphine and carbon nanotubes, the
difference being in the way that the sheets of carbon
atoms are are packed and interlocked. Yeah, this is one
of those amazing things about carbon. You know, if you
put the carbon atoms in one formation, you get this

(02:31):
very soft material that you would find in pencils, for example.
You put it in a different kind of modular combination
and you get diamond about as different as two substances
can being. Right, So it really shows that just by
changing these these orientations you can really change the properties
of this one material. Well, those little strands, those strands

(02:54):
that are thinner than a human hair, can be twisted
together to make a yarn like material and then oven
like cloth, which can then be laid in a mold
and then coated with resin or or a plastic so
that will take on a permanent shape. So, right, the
coated stuff itself is frequently referred to as carbon fiber,
but you may also see it more precisely referred to

(03:16):
as carbon fiber reinforced polymer. And that's it rolls off
the tongue, right, We're just going to call it carbon fiber, So, uh,
forgive us for taking a shortcut, but it has a
lot of interesting properties, right, So, for one thing, it's
five times stronger than steel and twice as stiff as steel,
but it's lighter than steel, about two thirds lighter by volume.

(03:40):
Also about eight times stronger than aluminum or aluminium depending
on where you live um, which is really handy since
aluminum is lower weight by volume is offset by its
lower strength, meaning that you have to use a lot
more of it to get stuff done. Right, So now
you've got this new material that you can use instead
of that in lots of different products, and as long

(04:02):
as it meets the needs of whatever that product is,
you are getting a benefit of something that's stronger and lighter.
That's pretty amazing stuff. So who does use this, Well,
the auto industry uses a lot of carbon fiber, right,
it's main mainly there to make the components of a
car lighter and stronger, which obviously I mean, that's the
properties of the material, so that makes sense to transfer

(04:25):
it to the final product. So why would you want
a lighter vehicle? The main reason is cause it takes
less power to move a lighter vehicle than a heavier vehicle,
So that means that you can make a more efficient engine.
You're using less energy to move the actual vehicle. And
as long as that vehicle has maintained its strength, so

(04:45):
you haven't compromised the safety of the people who are
in the vehicle. That's a good thing. Sure, carbon fiber
usually makes the car actually more resistant to impact than
it would be with just regular steel components. And in
terms of that efficiency, um, according to the oak Ridge
National Laboratory, which is this huge lab run by the
Department of Energy, you can make a car more efficient

(05:07):
just by trading out a steel body for a carbon
fiber one. So that means that you would end up
over time saving lots of money and fuel costs, not
to mention the environmental impact of having to consume less
fuel to get around. Uh. So, these are some interesting
uses of carbon fibers. Not the only one. There are
a lot of others will talk about. For example, we

(05:29):
you know Matt mentioned aerospace, a big, big industry that
it relies on carbon fiber. Yeah. Yeah, um, and a
lot of really mundane kind of things like golf clubs
or bicycles, fishing rods, sailboat masts and wind turbines. Yeah.
So the thing about carbon fiber is, well, I guess
we should go into the history and then I'll tell
you what the thing about carbon fiber is that's foreshadowing

(05:53):
so earliest use of carbon fibers. The interesting thing here
is that the earliest use I could find predates their
application in any of the industries we just mentioned. And
in fact, it wasn't even used to build something like
a structure. It wasn't used for its strength or lightness.
It was used for an entirely different property that's inherent
with carbon fiber, which is its resistance to heat. Thomas Edison,

(06:17):
A different kind of light. Yeah, yeah, exactly, not light
as in less heavy light as in let there be
so Thomas Edison, who, of course we know beloved Internet darling,
one of the favorites of the I guess I forgot
to boo when when we when you said his name
right right? I'm sorry, Okay, well we'll we'll put it
in there for you Internet boo. Yes, Thomas Hays in

(06:40):
the Elephant electrocutor, who did not personally do that, but
still use them as filaments for early light bulbs way
back in eighteen seventy nine because of that high tolerance
for heat. Now they can also conduct electricity, but they
have a high resistance. If you remember, resistance is what
we'd call the the UH kind of opposing element that

(07:03):
keeps electrons from flowing through a material smoothly. So if
you have a high resistance and you want to try
and get electric electrons from point A to point B,
you're not getting as many to point B as we're
leaving point A because some of those are converted into
that electrons converting into heat. You're losing it through that resistance.
I'm oversimplifying, but this is basically what's happening. So with

(07:27):
light bulbs, that's exactly what you do want. You want
to have something that's heating up, and as it heats up,
it starts to give off photons, light particles. That's what
lets us see that light. And of course, in this
case we're talking about light that's in the visible spectrum,
wouldn't be much used to us outside of that. So
you end up using this material that has a resistance
to high temperatures, because if it didn't, it would just

(07:49):
burn up. You know, you would get light, but it
would burn up, and then your light bulb would be useless.
That's just a fire, and that's less used exactly. And
while you would try and create a vacuum within the
light bulbs, so you couldn't really burn burn, you would
still end up having the material itself deteriorate really quickly
and the light bulb would be broken. And so anytime
you know when you have an old incandescent light bulb

(08:11):
and you hear it will pop and then you shake
it and you can hear the little chicken chinge. Yeah,
that's the filament that has given out because it has
been worn away so much. So anyway, the carbon fiber
tended to be a really good candidate for this filament,
and that's what Thomas Sen used. So how did he
create carbon fiber? Well, he carbonized something, which means that

(08:36):
you're taking one material and you're converting it into these
these carbon atoms, these crystalline structures of carbon atoms. Now,
specifically what Thomas Haysen was using was cotton and bamboo,
different different ones for different types of light bulbs. Experiment
with a lot of different materials. Sure, but but carbonization
is also how we make charcoal. We we carbonized would

(08:57):
that is exactly right? And so if you wanted to
carbonized wood, if you want to make your own charcoal,
you would have a few steps. One is that you
want to remove all the moisture you can from the
organic material, usually through evaporation and heating. So with would
we call it seasoning. And you may remember that just
in our recent podcast about the HMS victory, they would

(09:18):
season would in order to get as much moisture out
of it as possible and made the wood stronger as
a result. In this case, it's not to make the
wood stronger, it's really just to get rid of all
that moisture. And the next you would increase the temperature
to induce pyrolysisis it's a basic chemical change brought upon
a material through the application of heat. Okay, And what's

(09:40):
important in this chemical change is that you don't allow
any oxygen to come into contact with the material during
the process so that it can't burn. Right because, as
we remember, the three things you need are you need
you need fuel, you need oxygen, and you need heat
to create fire. So if you take any of those
three away, you don't have fire. So by taking the
oxygen away, you don't have to worry about prematurely burning

(10:02):
your material and you can convert it to carbon without
it actually catching fire. Very important in any application, specifically
for charcoal, because you don't want to burn it before
you burn it right, Otherwise barbecues over before it began
it is. Yeah, I've been in some states that some
pre sad barbecue with organic material. That means getting all

(10:22):
this stuff carbon converted down to carbon, while the other
stuff like water vapor essentially just kind of evaporates away
or kind of vibrates away. Technically, the atoms that are
other than carbon in the material are expelled during the processing. Yeah,
you can kind of think like carbon, they're allowed to
stay at the party. Everyone else is encouraged by the
bouncer to leave. So uh happen to those parties. And

(10:44):
a lot of chemical processes go on through pyrolysis. There's
one called isomerization. That's when a molecule gets rearranged into
another molecule that has the same constituent atoms but a
different physical structure. You know, like I was mentioning earlier,
the you know, the way you construct carbon atoms together
can depend that that determines what properties that material has pencil,

(11:07):
lead or diamonds. Same thing with any other kind of molecule.
You just well, not any but different molecules. You rearrange
the structure of the molecule. You end up with stuff
that has very different properties from each other, which is
another fascinating thing. You say, all the basic ingredients are
the same, but just by the way you arrange the
atoms within that molecular structure, you change the actual properties

(11:29):
of the overall substance. This is what I think is
awesome about science. I don't fully understand it because I'm
not a chemist, but I really find it fascinating anyway.
Another thing that you would have going on through pyrolysis
is called transfer hydrogen hydrogenation. This is where you can
tell I'm not a chemist because I can't say any
of the words. But this is the addition of hydrogen,

(11:52):
as one would imagine to a molecule from a source
other than from hydrogen gas, which is not the easiest
thing to get hold of because again, hydro gen is
usually uh captured in some other kind of molecular bonds.
It gets pretty buddy buddy with most other things. Yeah,
it's um it's it's just a gregarious kind of atom.
It likes to hang out with Budli's. So what you're

(12:14):
left with is carbonized material. So in the case of
cotton or bamboo, it's very fibrous in nature, so then
you have carbon fibers. Again not meant to know. We've
together to make some sort of material that's stronger and
lighter than steel but still had very good use. So
these were the fibers that would conduct electricity. They had

(12:35):
the high resistance. You lose some of that energy as heat,
but that's exactly what you want, so you're not not
losing it so much as converting it over to heat
to create light. Um This is actually called incandescence, where
you heat up a material enough so that it starts
to give off light, hence the name incandescent light bulbs.

(12:57):
And you've probably seen this in multiple applications, not just
incandescent bulbs. I assume most of our our listeners have
seen an incandescent bulb, even though they are becoming more
and more rare. But in any material that has heated
up beyond it's that limit you start to see it glow, unless,
of course, it's flammable and it's in the presence of oxygen,

(13:18):
in which case you saw it catch fire. So that's
exactly why Thomas Hayston decided to use this and ended
up being a success. It took some experiments to get
it just right, and even then, um, you know, obviously
over time we made great improvements to the light bulb
using different types of material as filament, not just cotton

(13:39):
or bamboo carbon fibers. But that was the very first
application of carbon fibers in any kind of manufacturing process.
We'll be back with more of the history of carbon
fiber in just a moment, but first let's take a
quick break and we're back. So we're still in the

(14:04):
late nineteenth century. This is eighteen eighties six, and I
still can't believe it for such a space age quote
unquote space age. Yeah, yeah, it's to the nineteenth century. Yeah. Now,
granted again used for different purposes, but still it's when
you hear carbon fiber that sounds to me like maybe
the nineteen seventies was where it got started. But no,

(14:27):
I was completely wrong. So you have the National Carbon Company,
which was the first company to make synthetic carbon, and
it merged with another company called Union Carbide in nineteen seventeen,
and eventually that company became Union Carbide Corporation in nineteen
fifty seven. Now, the whole purpose of this was to

(14:47):
make carbon fibers for things like lightbulbs, so we're still
in that stage. And meanwhile, in the nineteen thirties he
had engineers who began to experiment with fiber reinforced composites
or FARPs, which fiber reinforced composite to f r P.
Uh it technically stands for fiber reinforced polymers, but still

(15:09):
it confuses me. Anyway. This is a composite material made
out of a pattern of polymers that are reinforced by fibers.
The fibers themselves are needed to enhance elasticity and strength
of this plastic material. So the first record use, according
to oak Ridge National Laboratory, was for a boat hole.

(15:30):
So we've you know, you've seen fiberglass boats. I'm sure.
I mean that there's a very common thing for small
boats in particular, seeing fiberglass boats. That's essentially what we're
talking about. So fiberglass is used in a lot of
different applications today. It's not the same thing as carbon fiber,
but the the process, well maybe not the process, but
the overall outcome using yeah, exactly, using fibers to reinforce

(15:54):
a structure uh is is very similar to what would
end up being used as in the carbon fiber industry,
especially when you have the goal of making something very
strong and very light weight exactly. So by the nineties,
the defense industry began to get really interested in f
rps for obvious reasons. So the search was on for
new types of fiber that can make stuff stronger and lighter,

(16:18):
and a lot of work and material science was dedicated
to finding out whether the theoretical strength of certain materials
could translate into practical use. So what was happening was
that scientists were studying various materials and they would say,
all right, based upon the molecular structure of this material,
in theory, it has x amount of strength compared to

(16:38):
some other material, and why amount of weight by volume
compared to some other material if we were able to
to manufacture it properly, and so the difference between theory
and reality often there's a gap there because we just
don't have the perfect way to manufacture the stuff that
is theoretically possible, or to manufacture it in a way

(17:00):
that is uh less than completely expensive. Yeah, this, especially
early on, that is a huge challenge because you often
have to invent new ways to create material so that
means that you have to spend a lot of money
in research and development and and to build specialty equipment

(17:21):
to make that stuff. It's one of the reasons why
carbon fiber is not as plentiful as it could be.
But we'll talk about that more later. Yeah, So, back
in the nineteen fifties, there were three really big drivers
in the United States that pushed the development of these
carbon fibers forward. That's true. So you had the industrial
demand for lightweight, strong material, which included industries like aerospace, electronics,

(17:46):
sports equipment, that kind of thing. Then there was the
work in solid state materials that predicted high potential crystal
strengths are certain types of material. This is what I
was talking about just a second ago, where people were
doing this kind of theoretical works saying, hey, if we
just rearranged stuff this way in theory, it should be
even stronger and lighter. Let's just find a way of

(18:07):
making that happen. The math worked out and the physical
process would follow. That's exactly right. And then the third
one was that and this is probably the most important driver.
During the nineteen fifties, the U s economy was going
like gangbusters, y'all, so with that kind of bounty, there
was doing so well that there was the ability to

(18:28):
afford in investing in research and development and pushing these
kind of technologies forward. Even if they had an initial
high price to get into it, we could afford to
do it. So that was a big driver. Actually. So
we get to the years of nine to nineteen sixty,
that's when we had companies, primarily the Union Car Byte

(18:50):
Corporation previously mentioned. Yep, they began to discover practical means
of using carbon fibers as reinforcement. Those f rps we
were talking about similar to that. It So these carbon
fibers didn't come from cotton or bamboo, right they were.
They were using materials like rayon or poly acrylon, nitrial
or pan. Yeah we're gonna say pan because I kind

(19:12):
of enjoy saying poly acryla night trial. I'll never be
able to do it. My my mouth parts don't work
that way. But no, carbon fibers from these are made
from precursor fibers, which is made from you know, the
ray on, our our pan. So the precursor fiber. We
we use precursor as the term for stuff that you're
going to convert into carbon fiber. And that at Loan

(19:34):
like the precursor stuff had its own manufacturing processes, right
you you had these are synthetic materials that we had
to create first, that then we would create into carbon fibers.
So it's a it's a two step process in a
grand overview. Yes, many smaller steps within exactly, which we
will talk about in our second episode trust us for now. Yes, so,

(19:58):
but the important thing here to remember is that it's
not like you would go out to the fields and
get some rayon. You have to make the rayon first
and then you convert the rayon into carbon fiber. That
just cracked me out because the mental image of fields
of rayon was was a circle of hell. According to me,
the fields of Rayon I think would be a great
name for a band. Yeah, I'll get on that. But

(20:21):
the the important thing here was that using these types
of precursor fibers were what allowed them to create the
different shapes that carbon fiber could come into. They were
they were really well formed for that sort of stuff.
They were already strong and easily manipulatable. Yes, and if
you want to learn more about the history of the

(20:42):
Union car by corporation and its role in this. I
recommend going to a c s dot Org. It has
a lot on the history of carbon fiber development, goes
into a huge amount detail. And again, if we were
to go into as much detail as some of these
sources do, we'd be doing like a five part series
and think some of you guys might get a little
antsy uh yeah. I I did want to mention in

(21:05):
three that there was a way to make carbon fibers
from petroleum pitch debut um and those are those are
so many solid polymers kind of kind of like tar. Yeah, yeah,
And that was that's different obviously because you can actually
find tar in nature. This was not something that you
would have to first create the polymer and then do
the carbonization on it. You could get the actual stuff

(21:28):
and then separate out what you needed and then do
the carbonization on that um. And they experimented with lots
of other materials to try and manufacture carbon fibers. That
included polyesters, polyfinal alcohol, and phenolic resins yep. But it
turned out that pan Rayon and pitched the first three
they really concentrate on, we're the most useful for creating
high strength material so so it turned out their their

(21:51):
initial impulse was exactly what made the most sense. It
also made the most sense from a dollar standpoint, like
the the having the manufacturing industries that are already established
for at least rayon and pan meant that it was
less expensive than to create something out of whole cloth,
and petroleum pitch could be a byproduct of the petroleum industries.

(22:14):
So that's kind of a that's kind of a gimme, Right,
it's time for another quick break, but we'll be back
with more history of carbon fiber. So getting back to
those drivers we were talking about, the two industries that
drove the carbon fiber development the most in those early

(22:36):
years were the aerospace industry and the defense industry. So
you had some outside crises like the oil crisis that
affected the pace of development. And now we've got a
lot of different industries that have a vested interest in
creating lightweight, resilient materials for products, and carbon fibers receive
a lot of attention as a result. You can imagine

(22:58):
aerospace being the big one because we all know the
heavier stuff is, the more expensive it is to try
and get it out into space. The more fuel you
need to get it to escape Earth's gravity so we
can get into orbit. So especially these days, every dollar counts,
so and obviously you want it to be really strong
material because of Yeah, because because space, as we have

(23:22):
established numerous times, is trying to kill you. So you
want to make sure that you have a nice, strong
barrier between you and space and and the deadly, deadly space.
So uh yeah, obviously a big important driver. And of
course we're getting right into that era to where the
United States and the Soviet Union both were racing against

(23:43):
each other to try and get people into orbit and
to get people to and from the Moon. So it
was there were a lot of incentives to develop this
kind of material. Now, there's some problems with carbon fiber.
They have nothing really to do with the properties of
the material real itself. And one of the big problems
is that there are only a few companies that actually

(24:05):
produce carbon fiber material. So the price of carbon fiber
is still relatively high, which limits its use in consumer
goods or just drives the prices of those goods way
up as a result. So yeah, only the the more
affluent can afford those type of those type of products
that incorporate carbon fiber. Yeah, the last time I checked,

(24:25):
I think cars that incorporate a lot of carbon fiber
in their bodies are still running around the hundred thousand
dollar starting price range. Yeah. I mean they tend to
be really high performance vehicles anyway, because if you're gonna
go with that, you might as well go all the way.
It's not just a civic engine tossingiber. But still, your
your point is is very very valid. It's according to

(24:47):
oak Ridge, there are three Japanese companies that make carbon fiber,
four that are in the United States and European countries,
and then one Taiwanese company and that's it that produce
carbon fiber at least on the industrial scale. So when
you have a limited supply, you know, each of those
each of those companies has a limited amount that they

(25:07):
can produce just based upon their their facilities, right, So
if you need more than what can be made, you're
kind of stuck. You know. Anyone who wants to make
anything using carbon fiber is kind of limited in where
they can get that raw material. Oh sure. And part
of the reason that so few companies produce it is
that there are huge challenges in in actually producing this stuff. Yeah,

(25:29):
so one of them is that you first have to
get the precursor fibers. That's that's step one, right, You
have to have to create these precursors in order to
to turnam into carbon fibers. So either you either you're
buying it from some other company that manufactures it, or
you're making your own. But if you make your own,
that means you need two sets of manufacturing plants. Usually

(25:49):
you need one that's dedicated just to creating the precursors
and one that's decayed to carbonization. Now, some companies, like
the Japanese ones, have been co locating facilities so that
you have no real distance between the precursor facility and
the carbonization facility at least a little bit of money. Yeah,
but you know, not everyone has that luxury of being

(26:10):
able to build, you know, twice the facilities to make
one product. That also is another reason why the why
we have the expense. It's not just that, uh, there's
so relatively little of it to go around, but also
that it does take this very involved process to actually
make the stuff. So um. Other companies have actually bought

(26:31):
up old textile plants and used them to produce the
precursor fibers. Yeah, I'm wondering. Uh. Actually my my, uh
my grandfather on my father's side worked in such a
textile plant, which I believe is being converted over into
something like that. So that's kind of interesting. One of
my grandparents was also in textiles. So now I now

(26:52):
I'm curious. I need to look up the plant in
Pennsylvania that he worked in. The one in Georgia that
that my grandfather worked in once had its roof ripped
off by the torn you know. But that's a different
podcast entirely. So another Yeah, I guess I'll have to
wait till we until it comes back around again. Uh,
that was just for you Internet. So another strategy, uh

(27:14):
as far as the manufacturing and sale of carbon fiber goes,
is to include post materials processing with the production facility,
which means that instead of just creating raw carbon fiber,
which you would you can imagine like think of an
enormous spool of thread. I mean, it's just the huge
spools that have this thread that again is thinner than

(27:34):
a human hair wounds are. In some cases, they're all
kind of um braided together to make to make a
rope yarn, Yeah, like yarn or rope. You could just
buy that stuff, just the raw material there once it's
been produced, but then that means that whatever you are making,
you have to have the facility to be able to
take that raw material and shape it or or otherwise

(27:54):
post processes and then coated in whatever resin you want.
So some of these companies are creating that post production
facility where they can do some of the treatment ahead
of time so that it's a lot easier for other
companies to convert this into products. So that way you
remove a necessary step that the other company has to

(28:15):
do and make it a more attractive product. So that
might include weaving the fibers together, braiding them, or treating
them with those resins for molding, so that you know
you're not necessarily molding the stuff already, you're just pre
treating it so that it can be molded faster once
it gets to whatever company is buying the raw material.
That's the other reason why this gets expensive, right, because

(28:35):
not only do you have a two step too big
step process in just producing the carbon fiber itself, then
you have the whole manufacturing process of turning the carbon
fiber into a useful product. So every time we add
another process, you're adding to the cost. So, uh, anyway,
it's pretty cool idea to try and pare all this

(28:56):
together to help make carbon fiber a more attractive option
because obvious slee the demand is there, it's the supply
that we're trying to to perfect. Right, So this is
about where we are going to end for today's episode,
But when we come back next time, we're going to
go into detail about that manufacturing process, why it's so expensive,

(29:18):
and what's being done in the industry to try to
make it less expensive. Yeah, it's a really cool process,
and I'm glad that we decided to make this two
episodes because I really want to be able to explain
and and go into exactly what's going on behind the scenes.
It's pretty neat stuff. That wraps up this classic episode

(29:38):
of tech Stuff. Published again on June two, two thousand
and fourteen. I'll probably have to do an update about
carbon fiber, do a full episode about what we use
it for and you know, some of the things that
we hope to use it for in the future, and
if you have any suggestions for topics I should cover
in future episodes. Of tech Stuff, Reach up to me

(30:00):
on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff H.
S W and I'll talk to you again really soon.
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