Sustainable Precursors, Additives and Approaches for Carbon Fibers

Dear Colleagues,

Lightweight materials and carbon fiber-reinforced composites have recently found considerable use in the automotive and aerospace sectors, allowing to address issues related to environmental regulations, fuel price, and industrial demand. The industrial uptake of carbon fibers in other industries is still severely limited by the cost associated with the petroleum-derived polyacrylonitrile (PAN) precursor and the high energy requirements for the conversion of precursor fibers into high-quality (stiff and strong) carbon fibers. In order to reduce the production costs, there is currently a great demand for new approaches and methods to manufacture carbon fibers with high mechanical properties, while consuming less energy.

In the recent decades, there has been a renewed research interest in the use of bio-based or renewable precursors such as rayon, bio-acrylonitrile, and lignin, and of low-cost synthetic precursors such as polyethylene. On the other hand, significant research efforts have also been addressed towards reducing the energy costs or production costs in a number of ways, including the optimization of fiber processing conditions, the tailoring of PAN comonomer compositions, and the synthesis of high-molecular-weight PAN by reversible addition–fragmentation chain-transfer (RAFT) polymerization.

This Special Issue of Fibers intends to cover recent advances in renewable or sustainable precursors for carbon fibers and solicits contributions from researchers active in reducing the energy requirements in the stabilization and carbonization stages and in optimizing alternative, cost-effective precursors and the use of nanoadditives in carbon fiber manufacturing.

Dr. Pratheep Kumar Annamalai
Dr. Nasim Amiralian
Dr. Ashok Kumar Nanjundan
Prof. Darren James Martin
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• Renewable
• Lignin
• Cellulose
• Carbon fiber
• Mechanical properties
• Electrospinning
• Wet spinning
• Stabilization
• Carbonization
• Polyacrylonitrile