Is glass fiber composite better than carbon fiber composite?

Carbon fiber or glass fiber, how to choose the best composite material for your application?

You don't try to trim a bonsai tree with a chain saw, even if it’s fun to watch. Obviously, in many areas, choosing the right tools is the key to success. In the composites industry, where carbon fiber is often required by customers, fiberglass is actually a high-performance material better suited to their needs.

Carbon fiber is often hailed as the material of the future. When people think of carbon fiber, they might imagine a sports car with a door that opens vertically. For most composites manufacturers, carbon fiber is the material that makes composites interesting to customers and their design engineers before they realize that other composites, such as fiberglass, are better suited to their projects.

Sports Cars, road bikes and professional tennis rackets are made largely of carbon fiber. This is because these applications require materials of low density and high ultimate tensile strength to maximize their weight advantage. However, this does not mean that carbon fiber is ideal for every application.

Raising standards with glass fiber composites

In many cases, when customers are looking for carbon fiber, the material best suited to their needs is fiberglass. In fact, fiberglass is arguably the first high-performance material ever invented, a concept that dates back to before the Second World War. Fiberglass has proven its use over and over again, from door or window frame profiles to retractable rods, in automotive applications to railway couplings and telecommunications radome. If you think fiberglass is just for rowing, maybe it’s time to re-examine what else it can do.

Glass fibers have very good ultimate tensile strength, which is higher than most metals. It is an excellent insulator, has a very low Coefficient of thermal expansion, and is resistant to corrosion and weathering. For example, the ITER fusion power, developed by 35 partner countries, is a tokamak fusion power that uses a fiberglass composite precompression ring (PCR) to hold the reactors together.

The Fusion Power uses a PCR to absorb the deformation and fatigue of the magnet that holds the plasma, which is heated to 150,000,000 °C. Glass fiber was selected as PCR material because of its special high-performance mechanical properties.

Exel Composites offers a range of pultruded and pultruded composite solutions. It produces many carbon fiber products as well as fiberglass and hybrid fibers, using both carbon and fiberglass.

Determining the best material selection requires a clear understanding of the application and product specifications required, and the company first works with customers to develop mutual understanding. Based on this understanding, composite suppliers should use their materials science expertise to design the ideal composite product for the end user. The discussion should include costs, especially since carbon fiber raw materials are more expensive than glass fiber.

Custom composites range from the mixing of specific fibers to give certain properties, to managing the arrangement of fibers and resin formulations. For example, fiberglass tubes may require additional reinforcement along one side of the geometry. In this case, the carbon fiber can be strategically incorporated into the tube together with the glass fiber during manufacture to create a robust hybrid structure that meets both design requirements and cost optimization.

Whether you’re pruning bonsai trees or upgrading infrastructure, it’s important to have the right tools. While using a chainsaw or carbon fiber may seem more appealing, the low-key option can sometimes be a better solution to the task at hand.

The fiberglass has withstood the test of time. This material has not been replaced by a better alternative since its use in the early years of the Second World War. This is due in large part to the mechanical properties of the material as well as its competitive cost and design flexibility.