Carbon fiber hybrid fabric, not just for looks! What exactly is the best way to choose between aramid carbon, glass carbon, and metal filaments

Carbon fiber hybrid fabric, not just for looks! What exactly is the best way to choose between aramid carbon, glass carbon, and metal filaments

Carbon fiber has long been an unfamiliar word in the modern world of industry and sports, where extreme performance is sought. But have you noticed that carbon fiber cloth is not always black? Those intertwined yellow and silver threads are not only the "face value", but also the magic of engineers who turn stones into gold. Today, we will take a deep dive into the three star members of the carbon fiber blended fabric family: aramid carbon, glass carbon, metal wire (temperature-resistant PET), to see what skills they have.

Why weave different fibers together?

Pure carbon fiber cloth has excellent performance, high strength, high modulus, light weight, but it also has its own "Achilles heel": brittle, poor impact resistance, conductive (in some occasions is a disadvantage), high cost.
The core idea of hybrid technology is to "take the best from the bad". By weaving carbon fibers together with other fibers that have different properties, a "1+1 2" composite material is created that meets the needs of specific and complex applications.

Three Mainstream Blend Fabrics

Carbon Fiber Blend Fabric With Kevlar (carbon fiber + Kevlar fiber)

Core Characteristics: The golden combination of "strong" and "tough". Carbon fiber provides ultra-high tensile strength and rigidity, aramid fiber (commonly known as "Kevlar") gives the material excellent impact resistance and fracture toughness, to solve the problem of pure carbon cloth is easy to brittle; the weight of only 1/5 of the traditional steel, but the strength of steel 3-5 times; chemical corrosion and fatigue resistance performance is excellent.
Key difference: compared with other hybrid fabrics, the core advantage of aromatic carbon fabric is "impact resistance + high toughness", higher elongation at break (about 2.5%-3.0%, higher than the 1.5%-2.0% of pure carbon fabric), and it is not easy to collapse when impacted by external forces.

Carbon Fiber Blend Fabric With Fiberglass (Carbon Fiber + Fiberglass)

Core characteristics: the king of cost-effective, balanced strength and economy. Carbon fiber to protect the structural rigidity and load-bearing capacity, glass fiber to reduce costs (the price is only 1/3-1/2 of carbon fiber), while enhancing the corrosion resistance of the material; tensile strength is slightly lower than the aramid carbon cloth, but enough to meet the needs of most civil scenarios; better light transmittance (can be used for transparent composites), simple processing, suitable for hand-laying, molding and other molding methods.

Key difference: highlighting "low cost", slightly weaker impact resistance compared with aramid carbon cloth, but more than 40% higher strength than pure glass fiber cloth.

Carbon Fiber Fabric Infused With Metallic Filament (carbon fiber + PET filament)

Core Characteristics: Aesthetics oriented, maintaining carbon fiber structural strength and light weight. Metal filaments (actually temperature-resistant PET) also enhance abrasion resistance; rigidity is close to that of pure carbon cloth, giving different visual effects, and is mainly used for exterior parts such as pique racket faces and fishing rod grips.

Key difference: the core difference with Carbon Fiber Blend Fabric With Kevlar and Carbon Fiber Blend Fabric With Fiberglass is in "visuality expansion", not just optimizing strength or cost.

Quick Selection Guide

To give you a quick overview, we've made a simple comparison table: