3 ms·

I would predict that this manufacture method, with many small cut-up pieces of carbon, is going to produce relatively weak parts in comparison to equivalent twi

I would predict that this manufacture method, with many small cut-up pieces of carbon, is going to produce relatively weak parts in comparison to equivalent twill prepreg, thus you'll need more carbon to reach the same strength and it will be heavier. Carbon is good in tension because you're pulling a whole bunch of atomically perfect lightweight strings, but when you have chopped up fragments like this you're really only casting resin with reinforced mashed bits. Additionally, in real carbon parts you orientate the fabrics to get perfect tension/compression in the direction of the loads, or use multiple orientations bonded together for good all-round strength, but this manufacture method would have randomly oriented fiber directions.

jacquesm 10y ago
It's just marketing. The buyers know about as much materials science as the average office worker and will not have a clue about what the real applications of carbon fiber are like. They simply associate carbon fiber with 'modern, good, expensive, strong'. Most likely they would not be able to appreciate your comment. At a sailmaker where I worked in NL we worked on laying carbon fiber manually and laminating it to make sails that had almost no stretch for race applications, your comment is spot on and exactly why this whole exercise is pointless. It's all about getting long strands of fiber along stress lines and to make them denser where the stress is highest, a pour like described in the article negates a whole pile of the advantages that carbon fiber has. But it's a lot more efficient than laying long fibers and it still uses the same material so it will be sold.