Carbon fiber is an indispensable strategic new material in the national economy and national defense construction, China's carbon fiber industry after long-term independent research and development, breaking the blockade of foreign technology and equipment, industrialization has achieved preliminary results. However, at present, there are outstanding problems in the whole industry, such as weak technological innovation ability, imperfect process equipment, unstable product performance, high production cost, low-level duplicate construction, low level of industrialization of high-end varieties, and serious lack of downstream application development. If the bottleneck cannot be broken as soon as possible, China's carbon fiber industry may collapse under the fierce offensive of international carbon fiber giants.
From the introduction of concepts to the introduction of technology, and then to the attempt of localization, and finally break through the barriers and gradually replace the imported ......On closer inspection, carbon fiber has taken such a similar path to graphene, which is currently in the limelight. The two materials were crowned as the "king of new materials" when they were just starting out, and the characteristics of the two materials are very similar, and the future war between the two materials seems inevitable, so who is the king of new materials?
**: This is "born from the same root".In fact, carbon fiber has a lot to do with graphene, and even the "gimmick" that appears is very similar.
Solid as a rock and tough as a hair, it is a quality that human beings have been striving for in the field of materials since ancient times. A roll of black braid like cloth like a 'dark horse' jumping up from the new material, carbon fiber not only takes into account the characteristics of softness and rigidity, but also has not afraid of strong acid corrosion, ultra-high temperature resistance, electrical and thermal conductivity and electromagnetic shielding and many other shining points" This is the first description of carbon fiber. For the new generation of material graphene, it is not stingy with beautiful words, calling it "born extraordinary", it is the thinnest, hardest, and most conductive and thermally conductive new nanomaterial found so far, known as "black gold", is the "king of new materials", and scientists even predict that graphene will "completely change the 21st century".
In addition to the hype gimmick, carbon fiber and graphene originate from the "same root". To put it simply, carbon fiber and graphite are sparsely allotropic to each other, and both are elemental elements composed of carbon atoms, but the arrangement of carbon atoms is different.
Carbon fiber, as the name suggests, not only has the inherent intrinsic properties of carbon materials, but also has the soft processability of textile fibers, and is a new generation of reinforcing fibers. Compared to conventional glass fiber (GF), Young's modulus is more than 3 times that; Compared with Kevlar fiber (KF-49), it not only has about twice the Young's modulus, but also does not dissolve or swell in organic solvents, acids and alkalis, and has outstanding corrosion resistance. The microstructure of carbon fiber makes it have many excellent properties, and under the premise of maintaining low density, it can obtain great axial strength and Young's modulus. At the same time, carbon fiber has good resistance to ultra-high temperatures, fatigue resistance and corrosion resistance, as well as good electrical and thermal conductivity. These excellent characteristics are the premise to ensure that they are applied in various fields. In 1981, some scholars soaked Pan-based carbon fiber in a strong alkali NaOH solution, and more than 30 years have passed, and it still maintains its fiber form.
Graphene is a two-dimensional crystal, and its greatest characteristic is that its electrons move at a speed of 1 300 of the speed of light, far exceeding the speed of electrons in a general conductor. This makes the electrons in graphene, or more accurately, the "electricchargecarrier" very similar in their properties to the polaristic neutrinos. Graphite is formed by stacking layers of planar carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb-like orderly manner, and the interlayer force of graphite is weak, and it is easy to peel off each other to form thin graphite sheets. When the graphite sheet is peeled into a single layer, this single layer, which is only one carbon atom thick, is graphene.
Compared with graphene, carbon fiber has a long history of research and use, and it is relatively mature in market application, but its processing method, structure, and performance have great limitations. Since its discovery in 2004, graphene has attracted much attention around the world due to its strong ease of use and scalability, and is known as the black gold of the 21st century. In the field of textile applications, both have their own advantages. Mr. Song Yabin, a graphene researcher at the University of Manchester, said that in terms of preparation process, graphene is derived from graphite minerals, and through its unique wet spinning technology, it can be used in the textile industry more efficiently than carbon fiber.
Growth: The cycle of "going back and forth".From space shuttles to high-end watches, carbon fiber and graphene have been creating amazing "miracles" in various fields since birth. This also results in the same growth path for both materials.
China's research on carbon fiber began in the 60s of the 20th century, and high-strength carbon fiber began to be studied in the 80s. Progress has been slow over the years, but some progress has been made. Since the rapid development of the 21st century, Anhui took the lead in introducing 500 tons of precursor and 200 tons of pan-based carbon fiber per year, which made China's carbon fiber industry enter the industrialization. Subsequently, some places have joined the ranks of carbon fiber production.
Since 2000, China's carbon fiber has diversified its technology, abandoning the original nitric acid precursor manufacturing technology, and adopting a one-step wet spinning technology with dimethyl sulfoxide as a solvent and achieving success. A small number of domestic T700 carbon fiber products developed by independent technology have reached the international level of similar products. With the growing demand for carbon fiber in China, carbon fiber has been listed as a key support object for the national chemical fiber industry. In 2005, the global carbon fiber market was only 900 million US dollars, while in 2013 it reached 10 billion US dollars, and in 2022 it has reached 40 billion US dollars, and the application of carbon fiber composite materials will also enter a new era.
However, affected by the lack of quality, the development of the domestic carbon fiber market is relatively slow. In recent years, with the increase of the first volume, the demand of China's carbon fiber industry will also maintain a rapid growth.
Even at present, some domestic R&D institutions and large enterprise groups have gradually mastered the preparation process of high-end carbon fiber, but it takes a long time for the technology to be popularized, and the backwardness of the overall technology at this stage has led to a significant gap between the quality of China's carbon fiber products and imported products, which also greatly limits the application of domestic carbon fiber products in the high-end field. Some data show that China's carbon fiber products are concentrated in the low-end field in the application, and the proportion of application in the aerospace field with high carbon fiber quality requirements is only 3%, which is far from the average proportion of the international carbon fiber industry in the aerospace field; In the field of sports and leisure products with relatively low quality requirements, the application proportion of carbon fiber is as high as about 80%, and the application of domestic carbon fiber in the field of sports and leisure products exceeds the international average level by more than four times.
Compared with carbon fiber, China's graphene is facing the first test of life and death after a phased "crazy growth" in recent years.
Because graphene is very likely to set off a new technology and new industrial revolution that sweeps the world. In the past three years, a number of support policies have been introduced, and the capital market has added fuel to the fire, pushing graphene to a new climax. However, industry insiders have expressed their concerns: now graphene application products are low-end, homogeneous, and overhyped and other problems are becoming increasingly serious, the first round of the industry's "big reshuffle" has loomed, and in the next three years, at least more than half of the companies may be eliminated.
Application: Who can be the king of "One Moment of Brightness"? During the Han and Jin dynasties, on the shore of Baqiu Lake (now Dongting Lake), Zhou Yu, the head of the Eastern Wu Siying, played the long river chant and shouted "both Shengyu and He Shengliang" and died, and later called the person who could match it as "Yuliang". This inadvertently speaks to the relationship between carbon fiber and graphene.
Take the smart clothing industry, where the two major materials are relatively concentrated, as an example. With the rapid development of many smart wearable device markets, in the past two years, smart clothing has gradually begun to enter the public life, smart clothing has naturally become the force of many traditional clothing enterprises, a large number of forward-looking traditional clothing manufacturing enterprises, innovative technology companies have joined forces with universities, research and development institutions to invest a lot of research on smart clothing.
Different from traditional clothing, smart clothing is a cross-border product, which needs to combine technology, electronics, communications, Internet, medicine, materials science, textile technology, clothing design, clothing manufacturing and other industry technologies. Among them, the research and development and application of new materials is undoubtedly a key link to promote the development of the smart clothing industry. In terms of new materials, due to the vast market demand for heating physiotherapy, smart clothing with heating physiotherapy function led by graphene and carbon fiber has become the main breakthrough point for many clothing companies and technology companies.
In view of the two most widely used new heating physiotherapy materials in the smart clothing market, a detailed comparison of graphene and carbon fiber was made.
Compared with graphene, carbon fiber has a long history of research and use, and it is relatively mature in market application, but its processing method, structure, and performance have great limitations. Since its discovery in 2004, graphene has attracted worldwide attention due to its ease of use and scalability, and is known as the black gold of the 21st century. In the field of textile applications, both have their own advantages. According to Mr. Song Yabin, a graphene researcher at the University of Manchester, in terms of preparation process, graphene is derived from graphite minerals, and through its unique wet spinning technology, it can be used in the textile industry more efficiently than carbon fiber.
Secondly, in terms of structural properties, carbon fiber is made of flake graphite crystallites irregularly stacked, and this structure is extremely strict in the control of porosity, resulting in the decline of mechanical properties of carbon fiber, and the structure causes poor toughness of carbon fiber in the radial direction, and it is easy to fracture when bending. The graphene sheet structure in graphene fiber is highly oriented in the axial direction of the fiber, and the size of the transverse crystal is much larger than that of the traditional carbon fiber, which makes it very flexible and can not break even in the state of twisting and knotting, which makes graphene fiber have a huge advantage in the high-end textile industry.
In the field of new materials, the biggest feature of carbon fiber is "expensive", and the characteristic of graphene is "more expensive". In general, graphene has great advantages in textile applications, but it is much higher than carbon fiber materials, so it can be said that the emergence of graphene fiber has brought hope for improving the problems in carbon fiber applications. The change of controlled production form makes graphene have a variety of application possibilities in the field of smart wearables. There are many Chinese apparel brands that have invested heavily in the light application of graphene to put their R&D results into industrial application more quickly. The research and application of graphene materials will disintegrate existing products and lead the development of new technologies, and with the advancement of flexible display technology, its high-quality characteristics have huge application prospects in the high-end textile industry and smart wearable fields; Most importantly, graphene has better strength and stronger electrical and thermal properties, and can play a role in lightweight electrical conductors, fabric supercapacitors, smart biosensors, and smart heating suits.
Aerospace and industrial development have driven a boom in carbon fiber investment. Carbon fiber is a new type of fiber material with high strength and high modulus fiber content of more than 95%. The downstream fields of carbon fiber mainly correspond to the industrial, consumer goods and aerospace fields, accounting for % and 15% of the demand respectively. With the rapid growth of demand in the aerospace field and industrial field, the strategic supportive policies of South Korea, China, India and other countries have caused carbon fiber development and investment fever.
The United States and Japan have long occupied the high point of carbon fiber technology, and the domestic carbon fiber preparation is relatively backward. In terms of global carbon fiber production capacity, the market share of the top five carbon fiber companies is more than 60%, and Japan's Toray production capacity accounts for 18%, and its main products are pan-based carbon fiber and its prepreg and other woven materials and composite materials; In terms of countries, the market share of Japanese companies in small tow carbon fiber reaches 49%, and the market share of Japan and the United States in large tow carbon fiber can reach 76%. China is still lagging behind in the preparation of carbon fiber, only T300 carbon fiber has reached the level of similar foreign products, T700, T800 and M50J are only at the beginning of industrial production, mass production and breakthrough of key development technology stage, but there is also a structural overcapacity, high-end carbon fiber has the problem of technical barriers.
Some people say that there will be a battle between graphene and carbon fiber in the future, and this war will appear in many fields and in the future market competition. Carbon fiber for China's new material market, everything is based on the premise of industrialization and application, only at this stage, people will really understand carbon fiber, face up to the game between carbon fiber and graphene, that will also be a "thrilling" story.