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2023

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01

Tensile strength of carbon fiber

Carbon fiber is a brittle material, and its tensile strength is controlled by various defects. Defects can be divided into surface defects and internal defects. In terms of the source of defects, they can be divided into congenital defects and acquired defects. The former are "inherited" from the original filaments, while the latter are produced during the production process. Today, let's introduce the tensile strength and defects of carbon fiber.

Carbon fiber is a brittle material, and its tensile strength is controlled by various defects. Defects are classified into surface defects and internal defects. According to the source of defects, they can be further divided into inherent defects and acquired defects. The former are "inherited" from the original filaments, while the latter are produced during the manufacturing process. Today, let's introduce the tensile strength and defects of carbon fiber.

Among the various defects in carbon fiber, surface defects account for about 90% and are one of the main factors affecting tensile strength. The continuous improvement of carbon fiber tensile strength is due to the continuous reduction in defect size. In other words, in the 1980s, the defect size was relatively large, at the micrometer level, resulting in a fiber tensile strength below 4 GPa, equivalent to the T300 and T400 products at that time; in the mid-to-late 1980s, the defect size was controlled to the sub-micrometer level, and the carbon fiber tensile strength increased to about 7 GPa, with the emergence of high-strength carbon fibers such as T700, T800, and T1000.

From the beginning of the 21st century to the present, people are still adopting various technical measures to continue reducing the defect size, and it is expected that the tensile strength of carbon fiber will increase to around 10 GPa. Currently, a PAN-based carbon fiber with a tensile strength of 9.03 GPa has been developed in the laboratory. In other words, the basic idea of improving the tensile strength of carbon fiber is to reduce the size of various defects by all means, which is in line with Griffith's microcrack theory and the weakest link theory.