As the world strives to enhance the economy of automobiles and other automobiles in order to reduce carbon emissions and increase the range of electric vehicles, researchers are looking for ever-lighter materials that are sturdy enough to have been utilized in car bodywork. Carbon fiber composite materials, comparable to those used in tennis rackets and bicycles, blend remarkable strength with reduced weight, but they are more costly to produce than equivalent structural components made from steel or aluminum.
Researchers at MIT and beyond have developed a method for producing these lightweight fibers from a low-cost biomass resource: the thick, gloppy waste product left over from the petrochemical industry, which refineries now sell for limited purposes such as bitumen or finally discard as disposal. Not only is the carbon pollution fiber inexpensive to produce, but it also has benefits above previous carbon fiber materials in that it has deformation strength, allowing it to be employed in load-bearing situations. The study began four years ago in response to a query from the Department of Energy, which was looking for methods to make automobiles more effective and reduce fuel use by reducing their combined weight.
“If you contrast the same model automobile now to the same model car 30 years ago, it’s much overweight,” Ferralis explains. “In the same category, the mass of automobiles has grown by more than 15%.” Because a heavier automobile necessitates a larger engine, better braking, and so on, lowering the weight of the upper body or other parts has a knock-on impact that results in much better fuel efficiency.
Carbon fibers of the purity required for automotive applications presently cost probably $10 to $12 per lb, according to Ferralis, and “maybe a lot more,” up to hundreds of dollars per pound for specialist applications such as spaceflight avionics. This contrasts to around 75 cents per pound for steel or $2 for aluminum, however, these prices can vary greatly and the components are frequently sourced from outside. At such pricing, he claims that building a pickup truck out of carbon fiber rather than steel would cost nearly twice as much.
Composites comprised of carbon fibers are not a novel concept, but they have only been employed in a few high-end vehicles thus far. The current study hopes to change that by offering a low-cost starting material and comparatively straightforward methodological approaches.