The high performance of carbon fiber material makes it have a very high application performance in many industries. When the carbon fiber product is applied, it is found that the overall price is high. The place where the price of the broken fiber product is high has something to do with many places. Our team will tell you from the perspective of carbon fiber.
The carbon fiber products we see are actually very different from our carbon fiber materials, because fibers cannot be produced alone, and must be combined with a resin matrix to complete the production of products. One of the reasons why the price of fiber products is relatively expensive is that the cost of carbon filaments is relatively high, so we must first understand the carbon fiber tow material.
There are three types of broken fiber tow, including polyacrylonitrile (PAN)-based carbon fiber, pitch-based carbon fiber and gum-based carbon fiber. The most common PAN-based carbon fiber is actually the most common one, and the entire market share is over 90%, so the current thermoplastic carbon fiber basically refers to PAN-based carbon fiber.
Polyacrylonitrile was also invented at the very beginning. It was invented by Akio Kondo in Japan in 1959, and then mass-produced in Toray in 1970. The entire polyacrylonitrile carbon filament has very high strength and the characteristics of a model star. The asphalt-based fiber was developed by Gunma University in Japan in 1965. This carbon fiber tow has very high thermal conductivity as high as 90OGPa, so it is mostly applied to special functional materials. Viscose-based carbon fiber was mainly used as a composite material for spacecraft heat shields in the 1950s, and it is also the material that will be used now. So we found that the first two were invented by the Japanese, which is why the performance measurement standard of carbon fiber tow is based on Toray carbon fiber material.
Of course, the research and development of carbon fiber tow precursors has continued to progress in recent years, but the overall effect has not yet taken effect. Nowadays, PAN-based is still the mainstay. In the production of carbon filaments, the carbon yield of the three precursors can reach more than B80%. Theoretically, the price of such carbon fiber filaments will definitely be lower, but the production of pitch-based needs to be refined and modulated. This process will greatly increase production costs and reduce the yield to 30%. So the PAN-based ones are still more popular.
So let’s take a look at the widely used PAN carbon fiber. The price of PAN-based carbon fiber is much lower than that of asphalt-based carbon fiber, and it can be applied in many fields. The price of PAN-based fiber for satellites is as high as 200 yen/kg, while the price of carbon fiber for automobiles is as low as 2,000 yen/kg.
Then we still use Toray’s carbon fiber material as the basis. Here, the PAN-based broken fibers are divided into large and small tows. For example, the cost of the common 3K is 50-70 US dollars/kg, and the cost of 6K is 4-50 US dollars/kg. Therefore, we can also understand why small tows are more used in high-performance fields.
Therefore, we say that the price of carbon fiber will be more expensive. It is not without reason that it has a lot to do with the raw materials. In addition, the price of carbon fiber products is relatively high, and it has a lot to do with the fact that our carbon fiber products require a lot of labor and equipment.
Post time: Jul-25-2023