Carbon fibre as big advantage machinery section

Carbon fibre as big advantage machinery section

One material that particularly interests GE and other manufacturer is carbon fibre. This is already being used to make the large fan blades at the front of some jet engines. It is flexible as a raw material, but when a carbon-fibre cloth is impregnated with epoxy resin, shaped and cured, it can be as strong as steel and only half the weight. That strength comes from the powerful chemical bonds that form between carbon atoms. The fibres can be aligned in different directions, allowing engineers to tailor the strength and flexibility of a composite structure precisely.
The large-scale use of carbon fibre began in aerospace. Both Airbus and Boeing aircraft use it extensively instead of aluminium. Not only is it lighter, there is also a big manufacturing advantage: large sections, like the main area of a wing, can be made in one go rather than being riveted together from lots of individual components.
It is the strength, lightness and potential saving on manual labour offered by carbon fibre that makes the material attractive for a variety of products. McLaren, a British Formula 1 (F1) team, was the first to use an F1 car with a carbon-fibre structure. John Watson drove it to win the 1981 British Grand Prix at Silverstone. Later that year, in dramatic fashion, he demonstrated its ability to withstand crashes when he emerged unharmed from a pile-up at Monza. Within a few years every F1 team was racing carbon-based cars. But building them, largely by hand, could take 3,000 man-hours.
Now it takes just four hours to build the carbon-fibre chassis and underbody of the MP4-12C, a $275,000 sports car which McLaren launched in 2011 to compete with arch-rival Ferrari on the road as well as on the track. The MP4-12C is built in a clinically clean new factory built next to McLaren’s base in Woking, west of London. Eventually the company will manufacture a range of road cars using carbon fibre. It will get there faster thanks to the development of a partly automated technique for pressing the material in a mould and injecting epoxy resin into it under pressure. This was pioneered jointly with Carbo Tech, an Austrian firm that specialises in composites.
Like many technologies pioneered by motor sport, carbon fibre is now trickling down from supercars into more everyday models. BMW, for one, is launching a new range of electric and hybrid models which use carbon-fibre bodies. The first, a small urban electric cone crusher called the Hi3, will be assembled at a new factory in Leipzig from next year.