COMPOSITE

       Carbon-fiber has appeared increasingly in mainstream engineering in recent years and is used extensively in aircraft manufacture, body armor, wind turbines and sports equipment's such as fishing rods, tennis rackets and cycles, plus many other products.

In a modern F1 car, carbon-composites components make up arounf 85% of the total number of components, but in terms of weightm aonly about 20% of the overall 'dry' wight of the car. So what is this mysterious material, and how is it manufactured?

Carbon-fiber was first produced on a commercial basis for use on early electrical incandescent light bulb, in which a single loop of carbon glowed when electrical current was passed through it. The glass bulb contained the carbon was  evaluated to the remove most of the oxygen, which enabled the carbon to glow white hot without burning.

Controlling the interaction between carbon and oxygen would later become important in the manufacture of carbon-fiber composite components.

The material that we tend to refer to as 'carbon-fiber' today is usualy actually carbon fiber reinforced polymer, comprising a plastic resin permeated with the inidividual carbon fiberes and baked to form a rigid material with a very high strength to weight ratio.

Manufacturing carbon-fiber

An individual carbon fiber filament predominantly comprises carbon atoms and is usually somewhere between 5 to 10 micrometers in diameter (1micormeter=one thousands of a millimeter or 0.001mm), which so around onee fifht of the thickness of an average humain hair. Carbon fiber display a number of properties that make a carbon structure particularly suited for engineering applicationsm including high tensile strength, high stifness, a very high temperature and a high rsistance to chemical degradation. The downside of carbon-fiber materials is that they are relatively exoensive when compared to alternative materials.

To produce an individual carbon-fiber filament (known as precursor), individual carbon atoms are bonded together to form crystals, with the crystals aligned close to parralel witht he longitudinal axis of the filament. The alignmenent of cystals provides the fibre with very high strength for its volume. The filament geos through several privesses to clean it, provide a protective coating, and to aid bonding when the filament is processed.

Uusaly conventional carbon finer is to combine several thousands of filaments togehter to form a 'tow'. The tow figure of the carbon denotes the number of individual filaments combined to form each tow. For example a 24k tow is made of 24,000 individual filaments, which is considered anything from 48000 to over 30000 filaments, depending on its intentended application,.

Depending on the intended use the carbon fiber used in F1 car construction is usually supplied in two alternatives forms: either uni-directional(UD) or woven fabric.: As the name implied, UD carbon fiber us used for applications where high strength is required for a specific single directions of load, and un UD carbon fiber the tows are aligned together in the same direction.

The woven fabric carbon fiber materials used in motorsport are manufactured by weaving carbon tows together in a carefully designed pattern. The pattern and the weaving