MUNICH—As a perennial fan of “How It’s Made” videos, my visit last month to GE’s Global Research Center in Munich was particularly fascinating. Although the campus is not involved with any actual large-scale manufacturing, the scientists and researchers there do focus on finding ways to take manufacturing processes and make them better. There were endless miniature manufacturing nooks and crannies that we got to poke our noses into over the course of our week.
I came away fixated on carbon fiber. It’s most famously used as a lightweight, high-strength construction material in exotic cars and aircraft, but it’s becoming downright common these days. Today carbon fiber is in bicycles and golf clubs, and you can even get yourself a carbon fiber wallet if you’re so inclined. But its growing presence in everyday life belies its beauty and complexity—there’s nothing common about this increasingly common material.
It takes a lot to make a composite
Carbon fiber is properly described as a “composite material,” a term that is used to describe any substance with multiple components that combine in interesting ways to produce a material with complex, desirable properties. Most of our time on the GE campus was spent in the center’s composite manufacturing lab, and we were surrounded by tons of different composite materials, from glass to metals—but carbon fiber was the thing we focused on.
Read 25 remaining paragraphs | Comments