Almost any type of product incorporating complicated engineering to achieve something new can benefit from adding composite parts. However, even simple inventions that work better with the improvement of specific features can be enhanced by composite materials. This point can be illustrated best through the example of one of the most popular composite materials: carbon fiber.
What are Composite Materials?
There are many types of composite materials, most of which are designed to provide a particular set of benefits to products. As building materials, composites help product designers achieve things never before possible; this might make it seem like composite materials are highly complicated to describe, but the fundamental essence of what makes a composite material is a simple idea.
That’s because they tend to combine a matrix material with a reinforcing material to create a robust new building material with properties beyond what either individual substance can achieve.
What is Carbon Fiber?
One of the most popular types of composite materials is carbon fiber. This example works as described above since the manufacturing of carbon fibre composites often combines carbon fiber with plastic resin to create carbon fiber-reinforced polymers.
What Can Carbon Fiber Do?
Perhaps the most attractive aspect of carbon fiber is its high strength-to-weight ratio. Compared to most building materials with high strength, like many metals, carbon fiber composites are incredibly lightweight.
Carbon fiber products can replace many heavier parts in aerospace, military, marine, and other vehicles to improve performance capabilities and heighten fuel efficiency. That said, this quality also makes carbon fiber materials helpful in manufacturing sports equipment, engineering, and other types of machinery.
In applications with extreme heat, carbon fiber materials can often be used with minimal wear. Carbon fiber parts can withstand even higher temperatures than steel or other metals.
The amount of heat that your carbon fiber parts can withstand will depend on how they are treated in the manufacturing process. That’s why it is essential to work closely with your composite materials manufacturer when developing a product for a specific application.
High Tensile Strength
While many materials are strong and durable, carbon fiber is also flexible. Unlike steel, carbon fiber will not permanently deform when bent beyond its maximum tensile strength levels. This means it can withstand an enormous amount of abuse while ending up in perfect condition after the fact; this is also one of the reasons why carbon fiber is so valuable for wind power generation.
Finding a Carbon Fiber Manufacturer
When you’re looking for a composite manufacturer who can help you to develop new and innovative products, be sure to find one that is eager to work with you from the conception through to the final product.
Part of this is that your designs’ potential success will increase significantly when your composite materials are custom designed for your specific products. Another reason is that there may be many other ways that a composite manufacturer can assist you that you haven’t even considered, such as in building prototypes.
The best way to get started is to contact a composite manufacturer near you to find out about their services.