The carbon fiber market is expected to reach a value of over $2.3 billion by 2025. The exponential value and growth are due to the material’s various applications.
What are the uses of carbon fiber to make it so important?
Throughout this carbon fiber guide, you’ll learn about the benefits of using this material. After we provide the reasons manufacturers use this material, we’ll explain uses where this material makes the biggest difference.
4 Carbon Fiber Benefits
Carbon fibers (CF), or graphite fibers, come with various benefits due to the material’s composition. These features make them ideal for various applications. Some of their benefits include:
- Material flexibility: it’s easy for manufacturers to mold CF into complex patterns and shapes
- Corrosion and stress resistance: durable in corrosive environments and won’t degrade in poor conditions
- Strength and weight: has a fantastic strength-to-weight ratio; meanwhile, it’s lighter than aluminum and stronger than steel
- Thermal expansion properties: can cope with thermal stress
4 Interesting Uses of Carbon Fiber
Due to the various benefits of graphite fibers, we can assume that they’ll have important applications. Throughout this section, we’ll dive into the various carbon fiber uses and the reasons why manufacturers and designers chose CF over other materials.
1. Sporting Goods Instruments
If players or hobbyists are willing to pay more for instruments that offer higher performance, they can purchase recreational sports equipment made from graphite fibers. Some examples of sporting goods made from CF include golf clubs, arrows for archery, bows, and baseball bats.
2. Weight Conversation in Aerospace
Both space travel and aviation were among the first industries to adopt graphite fibers to manufacture vehicles and other parts. These companies use carbon fiber over titanium and aluminum alloys. Not only because they weigh less, but carbon fiber also offers more durability.
A great example of carbon fiber’s use in aviation is Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. It’s made of 23 tons of carbon fiber and is now the best-selling passenger plane in history.
3. Lightweight Vehicle Parts
According to Energy.gov, the next generation of carbon fiber composites could significantly improve fuel efficiency. Moreover, it could reduce passenger car size by 50%.
Now, manufacturers use CF’s flexible, durable, and lightweight properties to create aftermarket automotive parts and high-end vehicles.
4. Medical Equipment
Due to the graphite fiber’s lightweight and robust features, carbon fiber serves as an ideal material for manufacturing prosthetic limbs. Moreover, this material will appear transparent on x-ray scans.
Because of this, companies will use carbon fiber when manufacturing x-ray and imaging equipment.
Do Carbon Fiber Benefits Make It an Ideal Material?
The uses of carbon fiber vary from essential industries to carry humanity forward, like aerospace, to uses that we use daily, like automobiles. Graphite fiber’s various benefits make it ideal for lightweight applications that require durable materials.
Explore our blog for more carbon fiber tips and ways that graphite fiber offers more advantages than other materials. We recommend starting with a history of carbon fibers.
