For decades, access to the world’s highest-performance composite materials has been a privilege of a few countries. For high-performance carbon fiber, Japan and the United States have controlled that market with a combination of technological advantage and export frameworks explicitly designed to keep China out.
Last March we saw that this balance had changed, as the Chinese state group CNBM (China National Building Material Group) presented in Paris the world’s first mass production of T1200 grade carbon fiberthe highest step on the tensile strength scale of this material.
What is the T1200. As we explained a while ago, in the world of carbon fiber, the letter T followed by a number is a direct resistance classification. The higher the number, the more force the material can withstand before breaking. T1200 exceeds 8 gigapascals (GPa) of tensile strength, making it about ten times stronger than conventional steel, with a density that is just one quarter of that of steel and with a filament diameter less than one tenth of a human hair.
According to counted CCTV, a cable just over two millimeters thick, made up of 120,000 of these filaments, is capable of towing a bus full of 54 passengers.
More companies join this fiber. China showed its prowess at the JEC World in Paris, but the industries have already gotten up and running. At the end of April, PetroChina announced the inauguration of its first carbon fiber project high-performance in the city of Jilin, with an investment of approximately 1.3 billion yuan (about 180 million dollars). It is relevant because it is no longer just CNBM, as the state energy giant enters the sector taking advantage of its dominance in the supply chain.
Zhongfu Shenying, a subsidiary of CNBM, for its part, has commissioned additional production a new 10,000 ton plant standard fiber metrics. China’s idea is to build an industrial ecosystem from the top down, including mastering high-performance carbon fiber production techniques.
China had not been able to manufacture it for decades. High performance carbon fiber has been on dual technology lists for decades use of the Wassenaar Agreement, the multilateral export control regime created in 1996 with 42 member countries including Japan and the United States, but not China.
According to the China Composites Industry Association, the Agreement restricts the export of carbon fiber of high modulus (from grade T800) to non-member countries. This means that accessing materials above that threshold required, in practice, manufacturing them at home or obtaining them through alternative means. China did not have its first T300 until 2008. From there to the T1200 it took less than twenty years. It has taken Japan 43 to travel that same path.
How China has accelerated so much. The model that has been repeated many other times and in other sectors: state capital, research from universities and industrial capacity functioning as a coordinated ecosystem, with the same approach as China has been applied to semiconductorsbatteries or electric vehicles. In this case the protagonist is CNBM, which developed the fiber through Zhongfu Shenying Carbon Fiber.
Zhou Yuxian, president of CNBM, counted in the presentation that the country has demonstrated “completely independent and controllable capabilities throughout the entire industrial chain”, from equipment to the transition from laboratory to mass production. Chen Qiufei, head of T1200 R&D at Zhongfu Shenying, added Furthermore, the new grade improves the resistance of the previous T1100 by more than 14% and allows the weight of the equipment to be reduced in the sectors where it is applied by more than 10%.
Who led the market until now. Toray Industries, a Japanese company, dominates the global market with a production capacity of 29,100 tons per year. It also developed its own T1200 with 8 GPa strength, but so far has not announced a mass production line equivalent to that of CNBM. Mitsubishi Chemical, another Japanese giant, advertisement plans to double its high-performance capacity before 2027. The South Korean Hyosung Advanced Materials aims to reach 24,000 tons per year in 2028. On the other hand, on the American flank, Hexcel is defined as the main supplier of carbon fiber for aerospace and United States military programs.
Where is it applied? High-performance carbon fiber has been used for decades in combat aircraft, missiles, satellites and military fuselages precisely because it combines extreme strength with extreme lightness. With the T1200, things go even further. According to counted Interesting Engineering, the material could redefine the limits of fifth and sixth generation military aircraft manufacturing. In the civil sphere, commercial aeronautics already consumes around 76% of global carbon fiber, and the T1200 would allow additional structural weight reductions on platforms such as the Boeing 787 or the Airbus A350.
In energy, high-pressure hydrogen tanks use carbon fiber structures to withstand pressure with the lowest possible weight. China has also pointed out applications in humanoid robotics and in the so-called “low-altitude economy” (drones, air taxis and urban air mobility). The Chinese space company Welight Technology already operates a rocket whose structure is around 90% carbon fiber composites, which reduces weight by 25 to 30% compared to equivalent metal designs.
Cover image | Zhongfu Shenying
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