Carbon neutral

A high-performance structural material with lower environmental impact than conventional composites

Carbon fibre is not a recent invention, it has been around for more than 150 years, but the last half-century or so has seen significant improvements in its manufacturing process that allow for its excellent strength-to-weight and stiffness-to-weight ratios to be achieved and exploited.

Contemporary carbon fibres contain up to 95 per cent carbon, and have considerably improved tensile strength and modulus of elasticity over the earliest versions, up to 4,000MPa and 400GPa respectively.

Specific recent progress, linked with reductions in production and fabrication costs over the last few decades, has now made carbon fibre a favourite material for design engineers to use in the most demanding applications in the motorsport environment.

P2T composites do not require heat or pressure during manufacture, which means there is no need for an autoclave

Historically, the composites industry has primarily used rolls of ‘pre-preg’ (woven fibre sheets pre-impregnated with resin), which are then laid up in moulds to produce 3D components, cured through heating to create the final shape. Thermosetting plastics have been the preferred resin for the carbon