Skip to main content

Plant-based Carbon Fiber Currently Undergoing Research

Researchers may soon be able to produce a cost-effective and more environmentally friendly carbon fiber based on plants.

Currently, carbon fiber is made from petroleum products. It is high strength and lightweight, and used in high-performance cars to help reduce weight and improve handling. Its value is known with more expected to be incorporated in cars, and other vehicles, but, there are issues with it as well.

For one, the petroleum aspect of the manufacturing process makes carbon fiber expensive. While it is now common to find the material in supercars, it’s less-common in everyday vehicles.

Carbon fiber is made from acrylonitrile, which is made of oil, ammonia, oxygen and an expensive catalyst. The heating in the production process creates a toxic byproduct. Since petroleum is involved, the price of carbon fiber tends to fluctuate with the price of oil.

Gregg Beckham, group leader at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, is working on a new feedstock for the acrylonitrile. 

“If you can stabilize the acrylonitrile price by providing a new feedstock from which to make acrylonitrile, we might be able to make carbon fiber cheaper,” he said.

That new feedstock uses plants. Parts of the plants that people don’t consume, such as corn stalks, are broken down into sugars. They’re then converted into an acid and combined with a catalyst to produce the acrylonitrile. No toxic byproducts were made in the process.

The process isn’t currently scaled enough for automobile product, but scientists are working it on. Readily-available, inexpensive carbon fiber would make it easier for automakers to incorporate it into future vehicles. Those weight savings would benefit everything from the latest performance car to battery-electric vehicles that’ll soon be taking the automotive stage.

[source: Popular Science]

A version of this article first appeared on hybridcars.com

The post Plant-based Carbon Fiber Currently Undergoing Research appeared first on VWVortex.



from VWVortex http://ift.tt/2DBOmHv
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Project SportWagen: Going Stage 2 with APR

    When we last left you, the humble little SportWagen was fresh from the development process with our friends at AWE Tuning, sporting a new downpipe, exhaust and intake, allowing things to breathe a bit easier.  The car sounded great, but there was no getting around the fact that our wagon was still quite, well, slow.   While we realize that nothing we do to the Golf SportWagen at this point will make it a race car, we still felt compelled to do something .  To put it bluntly, we had a fever, and the only cure was more power. Flash forward a few hours, and we found ourselves at Waterfest, staring down APR’s palatial spread and the numerous tuned vehicles surrounding it.  Earlier in the year, APR had hinted to us that their 1.8 TSI files would be quite impressive, and based on what they were able to do with the 2.0 TSI found in the new GTI and our time in their Golf R, we knew it’d be worth the wait.  So with this in mind, we lined our G...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bugatti Chiron Won’t Get a Roadster Version

The all-new Bugatti Chiron hypercar will not get a convertible version like its Veyron predecessor did. Speaking to Autocar at the London grand opening of the sole Bugatti showroom in the U.K., marketing boss Stefan Brungs confirmed that the French automaker’s latest hypercar will only be sold in coupe format, with “no roadster or convertible” version in the plans. Brungs also said that the company is only planning on selling the allotted 500 Chirons as standard, so faster variants like a Super Sports version also aren’t likely. This is a very different strategy than the Veyron, which has targa top Grand Sport and Super Sports models, as well as a number of special edition models. The Chiron is set to try to break the world record for fastest car and attempt to beat the Veyron’s record of 268 mph. It is believed that the Chiron will be able to hit 288 mph. Powered by an 8.0-liter W16 engine with 1,500 horsepower and 1,106 pound-feet of torque, it shouldn’t ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Volkswagen Group Records Best Ever First-Half-of-Year Sales

With 5.5 million vehicles in customer hands after the first six months of 2018, the Volkswagen Group is seeing the best performance of its history. Group deliveries increased significantly in all core regions,” said Fred Kappler, head of sales for the Group. “Our core brands recorded strong growth in the first half year.” For the year-to-date, all of Volkswagen’s brands had sales bumps. MAN, SEAT, and Skoda led the sales charge with performances 24%, 17% and 11% better than the previous year. The big sellers, too, had strong sales periods, with Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Audi, and Volkswagen sales rising 3.5%, 4.5% and 6.3% respectively. That last figure is particularly good new for the board, since Volkswagen alone sold more than 3 million vehicles in the first half of 2018. As Kappler stated, the numbers are equally good when you break sales down by region. Brazil and Russia were the most improved markets (22% and 20%, respectively), while strong sales in Europe and China (u...
2 comments
Read more