What is carbon fiber?
Carbon fiber is a composite material most often found in race cars and expensive supercars although like all advanced technology it is finding its way into more and more vehicles. Despite it’s expense and high-tech uses carbon fibre is relatively easy to work with. The expense of carbon fibre is offset by it’s amazing strength and extreme lightweight properties. It is also extremely stiff and body stiffness plays an important part in contributing to good handling, especially at high speeds. Some production supercars use a carbon fibre monocoque, a construction technique that uses the external skin to provide support rather than the conventional internal frame. Other times the carbon fibre is used in the bodypanels or in areas where extreme stiffness and lightweight is beneficial. Carbon fibre is sometimes used in conjunction with fiberglass because of their similar manufacturing processes, an example of this would be the Corvette ZO6 where the front end is carbon fibre and the rear is
Carbon fiber is a noun. A very strong, lightweight synthetic noun. Simply stated, it’s a bunch of incredibly thin fibers composed of carbon atoms. How thin? Thinner than human hair. Think about that for a sec. It’s been around since the late 1950s or early 60s – depending on which form you’re talking about. And it’s been a pain in the butt ever since. Without getting too technical, the first high-performance carbon fibers had low strength and stiffness properties. Translation: they weren’t up to spec for pretty much anything. Technological breakthroughs in the decades to come yielded vastly superior raw materials to work with. But we’re talking about petroleum pitch, resin impregnation, parallel microscopic crystal bonding, oil refining and a bunch of other processing techniques that even our Mad Scientists have a hard time pronouncing. Real nasty, messy, extremely difficult stuff. But here’s the intriguing thing: carbon fiber has an extremely high strength-to-weight ratio. Translation
