Carbon fiber composite materials have a series of performance advantages, such as light weight, high strength, high modulus, fatigue resistance, machinability, etc., and are widely used in aerospace, automobile manufacturing, rail transit, intelligent manufacturing, high-end medical and other fields. Carbon fiber box is a form of carbon fiber composite materials, the application of military transportation and new energy vehicles is relatively more, the former has carbon fiber military transportation box, the latter has carbon fiber car battery box. Because the manufacturing cost of carbon fiber composite material is too expensive, the overall price of carbon fiber box is relatively high, resulting in the practical application of carbon fiber box is limited. In order to truly enter our daily life, only the price can come down. So how to get the price of carbon fiber boxes down?
Carbon fiber products are expensive, a big reason is that demand exceeds supply. China is the largest buyer in the global carbon fiber demand market. By the end of 2020, the global carbon fiber production capacity is about 170.9 kilotons, of which 81.4 kilotons is occupied by Japan. Germany's SGL operates 15 kilotons; The United States has 20.8 kilotons of carbon fiber, while China's carbon fiber production capacity is within 10 kilotons, which is a serious shortage of capacity. Given that the core technology of carbon fiber is monopolized by foreign companies such as Japan and the United States, it will be difficult to drastically reduce the cost and price of carbon fiber casings. If we want to reduce the price of carbon fiber boxes, we will break the carbon fiber monopoly, conquer foreign monopoly equipment and technology, and improve the domestic carbon fiber quantitative belt and qualitative change.
By improving product quality, the service life of products can be extended. Taking carbon fiber customized military transport box structure as an example, the overall weight is reduced by about 30% compared with the traditional rolling plastic box. In view of the complex and harsh working environment of the transport box, the service life of the carbon fiber transport box is much longer than that of the traditional transport box. So overall, the cost of use is actually going down.
Carbon fiber box structure is the carbon fiber epoxy resin based material through autoclave or molding way of curing. Currently, many carbon fiber parts are cured in molds. Most of the cost is the mold fee and the price is very high. If the structure is complex or the box with high precision requirements, the cost of the mold is basically tens of thousands. If the quantity is small, the cost to each box is still very high, but if mass production, the cost of the mold to each box will be much less.
Through the optimization design of the box structure, under the premise of ensuring the performance, the maximum use of the performance advantage of carbon fiber, the optimization of some non-essential parts, reduce the complexity of the structure, can reduce the material and the corresponding processing steps of carbon fiber composite materials, to achieve the effect of reducing the cost of carbon fiber box.
There are many kinds of carbon fiber composite materials. Carbon fiber profilaments are divided into different series according to tensile strength and modulus. The number of fibers contained in different types of bundles is different. To produce carbon fiber boxes with different requirements, carbon fiber prepregs of corresponding performance grades should be selected, which can further control the production cost and reduce the overall selling price.