Abstract
The story of carbon fibres as we know them today begins in the 1950s and 60s when the requirement of the aerospace industry for better lightweight materials became urgent. Following the realisation that low density fibres of high modulus could be used as the reinforcing elements in composites, there were a number of relatively successful attempts to prepare carbon fibres, especially those of Roger Bacon at Union Carbide using viscose rayon (see Bacon 1975), of Shindo (1961) in Japan using polyacrylonitrile (PAN), and of Otani (1965), also in Japan, using an isotropic pitch. However, all of these procedures incorporated an expensive hot stretching process, and although fibres were produced commercially from viscose rayon (Union Carbide) and petroleum pitch (Kureha Kagaku), now carbon fibres from PAN and mesophase-pitch (MP) predominate.
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