Source: Carbon Fiber Society

1 Introduction

       The main core technology and production capacity of carbon fiber are mainly controlled by Japan, the United States and a few developed countries and regions in Europe. Moreover, due to its high technology content and high profit return, Western countries have imposed strict technical blockade on China for a long time. Based on the national strategic needs of carbon fiber materials and the urgent situation of the international technology blockade, China has listed it as one of the core technologies of the emerging industries. In the national “Twelfth Five-Year” science and technology plan, the preparation and application technology of high-performance carbon fiber is one of the core technologies of strategic emerging industries supported by the state. In May 2015, the State Council officially released “Made in China 2025”, which promoted and developed new materials as one of the key areas. Among them, high-performance structural materials and advanced composite materials are the development focus of new materials. In October 2015, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology officially announced the "Technology Roadmap for China's Manufacturing 2025 Key Areas", with "High Performance Fibers and Composite Materials" as the key strategic materials. The goal for 2020 is "Domestic carbon fiber composite materials meet the needs of large aircraft." Technical requirements for equipment". In November 2016, the State Council issued the “13th Five-Year National Strategic Emerging Industry Development Plan”, clearly pointing out the strengthening of the upstream and downstream cooperation of the new materials industry, conducting pilot demonstrations of synergistic applications in the field of carbon fiber composite materials, and building a collaborative application platform. In January 2017, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the Ministry of Finance jointly formulated the "Guidelines for the Development of New Materials Industry", proposing that by 2020, "70 or more in the fields of carbon fiber composite materials, high-quality special steel, and advanced light alloy materials." Focus on the industrialization and application of new materials, and establish a technological equipment support system that matches the development level of China's new materials industry."

Since carbon fiber and its composites play an important role in national defense and people's livelihood, many experts focus on the analysis of their development and research trends. Zhou Hong reviewed the scientific and technological contributions made by American scientists in the early stage of high-performance carbon fiber technology development, and scanned and reported on six major application fields and recent technological progress of carbon fiber; Wei Xin et al. The production process, performance and application, and current state of technology development were reviewed, and constructive comments were made on the problems in the development of domestic carbon fiber. In addition, many people have conducted research on the metrology analysis of papers and patents in the field of carbon fiber and its composite materials. For example, Ma Xianglin and others analyzed the distribution and application of patent holders of carbon fiber Chinese patents from 1998 to 2017. Yang Sisi et al. conducted a search and statistics on global carbon fiber cloth patents based on the Innography platform, from the annual development trend of patents. The patentee, the patent technology hotspot and the core patent of the technology were analyzed.

From the development track of carbon fiber research, China's research is almost started simultaneously with the world, but the development is slow. The production scale and quality of high-performance carbon fiber are different from those of foreign countries. It is urgent to speed up the research and development process, advance strategic layout, and seize the future industry. Develop opportunities. Therefore, this paper firstly investigates the project layout of countries in the field of carbon fiber research to understand the R&D route planning of various countries. Secondly, since the basic research and applied research of carbon fiber is extremely important for the research and development of carbon fiber technology, we will study from academic research. Results - SCI papers and applied research results - patents simultaneously conduct metrology analysis to fully understand the progress of research and development in the field of carbon fiber; and scan the recent research trends in this field to glimpse the progress of international frontier research and development. Finally, based on the above research results, suggestions for the research and development of carbon fiber in China are put forward.

2. Layout of carbon fiber research projects in major countries/regions

The main producing countries of carbon fiber include Japan, the United States, South Korea, some European countries and Taiwan. In the early stage of the development of carbon fiber technology, advanced technology countries have realized the importance of this material, and have carried out strategic layouts to promote the development of carbon fiber materials.

2.1 Japan

Japan is the country with the most developed carbon fiber technology. Japan's Toray, Toho and Mitsubishi Liyang's carbon fiber production accounts for about 70% to 80% of the global market. Despite this, Japan still attaches great importance to maintaining its advantages in this field, especially the development of high-performance PAN-based carbon fiber and energy and environmentally friendly technologies, and provides strong support for human and financial resources, including the “Energy Basic Plan” and “ Among the many basic policies such as the Economic Growth Strategy Outline and the Kyoto Protocol, this is a strategic project that should be promoted. Based on the National Energy and Environmental Basic Policy, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan has proposed the “Energy Saving Technology Research and Development Program”. With the support of the above policies, the Japanese carbon fiber industry has been able to more effectively pool resources and promote the solution of common problems in the carbon fiber industry.

"Technology development such as innovative new structural materials" (2013-2022) is a project implemented under Japan's "Future Development Research Program", which aims to achieve a significant reduction in the weight of transportation vehicles (half weight reduction of automobiles). The development of innovative structural materials technology and the combination of different materials, and ultimately its practical application. After the Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) took over the research and development project in 2014, several sub-projects were developed. The overall goal of the carbon fiber research project “Innovative Carbon Fiber Basic Research and Development” is to develop new carbon fiber precursor compounds and to clarify the carbonization structure. Formation mechanism; development and standardization of carbon fiber evaluation methods. The project was led by the University of Tokyo, and the Industrial Technology Research Institute (NEDO), Toray, Teijin, Toho Texex, and Mitsubishi Rayon participated in the project. It has made significant progress in January 2016 and was invented in Japan in 1959. After the "Kondo method", another major breakthrough in the field of PAN-based carbon fiber.

2.2 United States

The United States Defense Advanced Research Institute (DARPA) launched the Advanced Structural Fibers Project in 2006 with the aim of convening national superior scientific research forces to develop next-generation structural fibers based on carbon fiber. With the support of this project, the Georgia Institute of Technology's research team broke through the original silk preparation technology in 2015, which increased its modulus of elasticity by 30%, marking the development capability of the third generation of carbon fiber in the United States.

In 2014, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced that it would provide 11.3 million "multi-step catalytic processes for the conversion of non-food biomass sugars to acrylonitrile" and "research and optimization of multi-channel biomass-derived acrylonitrile" projects. US dollar funding to promote the production of cost-competitive renewable high-performance carbon fiber materials using renewable non-food-based materials such as agricultural residues and woody biomass, and plans to use biomass renewable carbon fiber by 2020 Production costs are reduced to less than $5/lb.

In March 2017, the US Department of Energy announced another $3.74 million to fund a “low-cost carbon fiber component R&D project led by the Western Research Institute (WRI), which uses low-cost carbon fiber as a raw material, such as coal and biomass. component.

In July 2017, the US Department of Energy announced funding of $19.4 million to support advanced energy-efficient vehicle technology research and development, of which $6.7 million was used to fund the use of computational materials engineering to produce low-cost carbon fiber, including multi-scale evaluation methods for developing integrated computer technology. Used to evaluate the enthusiasm of new carbon fiber precursors, and use advanced molecular dynamics-assisted density functional theory, machine learning and other tools to develop advanced computer tools to improve the efficiency of low-cost carbon fiber raw materials.

2.3 Europe

The European carbon fiber industry developed closely with Japan and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. However, due to technology and capital, many companies that produce carbon fiber alone did not insist on the high growth period of carbon fiber demand after 2000. Germany SGL The company is the only company in Europe that has a major share of the world carbon fiber market.

In November 2011, the EU launched the EUCARBON project to improve Europe's manufacturing capabilities in aerospace carbon fiber and prepreg materials. The project lasted for 4 years with a total investment of 3.2 million euros. In May 2017, it successfully established Europe's first special carbon fiber production line for aerospace applications such as satellites, which made Europe hope to get rid of the import dependence of the product and ensure the safety of material supply.

The EU's Seventh Framework Program supports the “Preparation of Functionalized Carbon Fibers with New Precursors with Cost-Effective and Regulative Performance” (FIBRALSPEC) Project (2014-2017) for €6.08 million. The project lasts for 4 years and is led by the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. The Italian, British, Ukrainian and other multinational companies are jointly involved in the process of innovation and improvement of the continuous preparation of polyacrylonitrile-based carbon fibers to achieve experimental production of continuous PAN-based carbon fibers. . The project has successfully completed the development and application of carbon fiber and reinforced composite technology from renewable organic polymer resources (such as supercapacitors, rapid emergency shelters, and prototype mechanical electric spin coaters and production lines for nanofibers).

More and more industrial sectors (such as automotive, wind power, and boatbuilding) require lightweight, high-performance composites, which is a huge potential market for the carbon fiber industry. The EU invested 5.968 million euros to launch the CARBOPREC project (2014-2017), whose strategic goal is to develop low-cost precursors from renewable materials that are widely found in Europe, and to produce high-performance carbon fibers through carbon nanotubes.

The European Union's CleanSky II research program funded a “composite tire development” project (2017), which is led by the Fraunhofer Institute for Production and System Reliability (LBF) in Germany and plans to develop carbon fiber reinforcement for the Airbus A320. Composite aircraft front wheel components, the goal is to reduce weight by 40% compared to traditional metal materials. The project funding is about 200,000 euros.

2.4 South Korea

South Korea's carbon fiber R&D and industrialization started late, and research and development began in 2006. In 2013, it officially entered the practical stage, which reversed the situation that Korean carbon fiber relied entirely on imports. The industry pioneers represented by Hyosung Group and Taiguang in Korea are actively engaged in the industrial layout of the carbon fiber industry, and the momentum is growing strongly. In addition, Japan's Toray's carbon fiber production base in South Korea has also promoted the Korean carbon fiber market.

The South Korean government has chosen to make Hyosung Group a carbon fiber innovation industry gathering place. The aim is to form a carbon fiber material industry cluster and promote the development of the creative economy ecosystem in the Jeonbuk area. The ultimate goal is to form a carbon fiber material→parts and finished products one-stop production chain, establish a carbon fiber incubation cluster comparable to the US Silicon Valley, and explore new markets and create The new added value will achieve the goal of exporting 10 billion US dollars (equivalent to RMB 55.2 billion) of carbon fiber-related products by 2020.

3 Global Carbon Fiber Research and Research Output Analysis

This section counts the SCI papers and DII patents related to carbon fiber research since 2010, and analyzes both the academic research and industrial R&D of global carbon fiber technology to comprehensively understand the progress of carbon fiber research and development in the world.

The data was obtained from the SCIE database and the Dewent database in the WEB OF SCIENCE database published by Clarivate Analytics; the search time range: 2010-2017; the search date: February 1, 2018.

3.1 Annual trends

Since 2010, the world has published 16,553 related papers and applied for 26,390 invention patents, all of which have shown a steady upward trend year by year.

3.2 National or regional distribution

China's carbon fiber papers and invention patent applications (the countries with statistical priority here) are the most, showing a leading edge; the number of papers ranked in the 2nd to 5th ranks are US, Japan, UK and Korea; the number of invention patent applications is ranked The 2 to 5 countries are Japan, Korea, the United States, and Germany.

3.3 Institutional analysis

The top 10 institutions with the largest output of global carbon fiber research papers are from China. The top five are: Chinese Academy of Sciences, Harbin Institute of Technology, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Donghua University, and Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Among the foreign institutions, Indian Institute of Technology, University of Tokyo, University of Bristol, Monash University, Manchester University, and Georgia Institute of Technology are between 10 and 20.

Among the top 30 organizations in the number of patent applications, there are 5 in Japan, and 3 of them are in the top five, and Toray is ranked first, followed by Mitsubishi Rayon (2nd), Teijin (4th), Toho (10th), Japan Toyobo Co., Ltd. (24th); 21 Chinese institutions, Sinopec Group Company has the largest number of patents, ranking third, followed by Harbin Institute of Technology, Henan Kexin Cable Company, Donghua University, Shanghai, China Petrochemical, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, etc., Shanxi Institute of Chemical Industry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences applied for 66 invention patents, ranking 27th; there are 2 Korean institutions, of which Hyosung Co., Ltd. ranks first, ranking 8th.

In terms of output institutions, the output of the paper mainly comes from universities and scientific research institutions. The patent output mainly comes from the company's enterprises. It can be seen that carbon fiber manufacturing is a high-tech industry, as the main body of carbon fiber R&D industry development. The company's enterprises attach great importance to the protection of carbon fiber research and development technology, especially the two major Japanese companies, the number of patents is far ahead.

3.4 Research hotspots

Carbon fiber research papers cover the most research topics: carbon fiber composites (including carbon fiber reinforced composites, polymer matrix composites, etc.), mechanical properties, finite element analysis, carbon nanotubes, delamination, reinforcement, fatigue, microstructure, Electrospinning, surface treatment, adsorption, and the like. Papers involving these keywords accounted for 38.8% of the total number of papers.

The most common topics covered by carbon fiber invention patents are carbon fiber preparation, production equipment and composite materials. Among them, Japan Toray, Mitsubishi Rayon, Teijin and other companies have carried out important technical layouts in the field of “carbon fiber reinforced polymer compounds”. In addition, Toray and Mitsubishi Rayon are in “polyacrylonitrile production of carbon fiber and production equipment”, "The use of unsaturated nitriles, such as polyacrylonitrile, poly (polyacrylonitrile) to make carbon fiber" and other technologies have a large proportion of patent layout, and Japan Teijin company in the "carbon fiber and oxygen compound composite" has a large proportion of patents layout.

China's Sinopec Group, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, and Ningbo Institute of Materials of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have a large proportion of patents on the “polycarbononitrile production of carbon fiber and production equipment”. In addition, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Shanxi Institute of Coal Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Ningbo Institute of Materials of the Chinese Academy of Sciences "Inorganic fiber as a compounding compound for the preparation of high-molecular compounds"; Harbin Institute of Technology's key layout "carbon fiber treatment", "carbon fiber and oxygen compound composite materials" and other technologies.

In addition, it has been found from the annual distribution statistics of global patents that some new hotspots have emerged in the last three years, such as: “Composition of polyamides obtained by the formation of carboxylic acid amide bond reaction in the main chain”, “by A composition of a polyester obtained by reacting one carboxylic acid ester bond in a main chain, a "automobile material mainly composed of a synthetic material", and an "oxygen compound of a cyclic polycarboxylic acid" as a carbon fiber composite material of a compound.