Exploring the Over and Unders of the Carbon Fiber Textiles Market

In the past few decades, carbon fiber (CF) has undoubtedly established itself as a standard in the industry for any product that requires high strength but is weight-sensitive. Be it aircraft, automobiles, consumer electronic devices like phones or laptops, prosthetics, or sporting goods like bicycles, the top variant is always ‘carbon fiber’ these days.

The applications of CF are wide and apart from its much-desired characteristics, another key enabler behind its penetration into so many industries is its availability in a form that is easy to handle, can be used to manufacture parts with low to medium shape-complexity, and does not require exceptionally skilled labor. CF textile thus serves as a perfect solution.

Though available in the form of tows, dry fabrics, pre-impregnated fabrics (prepreg), chopped fiber, etc., CF in the fabric or textile form, has the widest spectrum of applications and currently constitutes ~35% of the annual global CF demand and, though still capturing a significant share, the demand for CF textiles has seen a little decline in the past half a decade, primarily because of the increasing adoption of pultrusion for the production of CF parts, used in the wind industry.

The upward trajectory despite the changing dynamics:

According to Stratview Research, wind energy, transportation, and aerospace (in that order) are the top three demand-generating industries for CF textiles, with a combined share of ~70% in the market. Wind, despite seeing a decline in the demand for CF textiles in the past 5 years, still remains the biggest demand generator in terms of volume, and that too by a significant lead. Currently, wind constitutes ~35% of the global CF textiles demand, which would’ve been at least ~45%, had the sector continued with its traditional method of spar cap manufacturing.

Before 2020, hand-layup and RTM used to be the preferred method for spar-cap manufacturing since both the size of the new blades as well as the volume of wind turbine installations were within the delivering capacity of these methods. But in 2020, globally, the wind industry saw new installations hitting the 90 GW mark (>50% increase from 2019) for the first time and between 2015-2020, the average size for new blades also reached ~70 meters. While a matter of achievement, these developments made the industry realize that a faster production method was required. Thus, after 2020, the industry started transitioning towards pultrusion, which uses towpregs instead of fabrics, thus lowering the demand slightly from the wind industry.

But the good news is, a 100% transition to pultrusion is yet to be achieved, and also, spar caps though major, aren’t the only application of CF textiles in wind. CF textiles have been used for other applications like leading/trailing edges too. Thus, with a projected further addition of ~791 GW of new capacity in the next five years globally according to GWEC (~43,000 installations of 220-280 meter diameter systems), wind will continue to be the biggest demand generator for CF textiles, for the next 5 years too, according to a report from Stratview Research.

The other top 2 industries, i.e. transportation and aerospace, currently do not show indications of any transitions that could have a negative impact on the demand and instead, have highly positive production outlooks. The table below shows the outlook for both the industries.

 Table 1: - Production outlook for the aerospace and automotive industry                 Source: Airbus, Toyota

With all the top three demand-generating industries observing a positive trend, combined with additional demand from industries like sporting goods, construction, marine, etc.; a demand for ~85 million lbs of CF textiles is expected to be generated globally in 2030 according to a report.

China, accounting for ~50% of the projected wind installations, and ~20% of the projected aircraft deliveries, will be the biggest consumer of CF textiles. With such high demand from the APAC region, the market will see new entrants from the APAC region too and companies like Reliance (India) have already announced plants with an annual capacity of 20,000 metric tonnes to start operations from as soon as 2025.

So, as the global demand for high-performance materials intensifies, CF textiles are primed for significant growth, driven by innovation, industry expansion, and APAC’s emerging dominance.

Originally authoured by Stratview Research, and published on - .Textiletechnology.net.