In 1880, American inventor Edison first carbonized bamboo fiber into silk as a luminous filament in the light bulb, opening the precedent of carbon fiber (CarbonFiber, abbreviated as CF). The pioneer of carbon fiber for structural materials, represented by Union Carbide Company (U.C.C.) in the United States, used pitch fiber as raw material in 1959, and after thousands of degrees of high temperature carbonization, carbon fiber with elasticity of about 40GPa and strength of about 0.7GPa was obtained; in 1965, the company used the same raw material to extend at a high temperature of 3000 °C to develop filamentous highly elastic graphitized fibers with elasticity of about 500GPa and strength of about 2.8GPa. In 1961, Dr. Shoo Jinto, Osaka Industrial Technology Laboratory in Japan, used Polyacrylonitrile (PANYRILE) polyacrylonitrile (PAN for short) as raw material, and obtained an elasticity rate of after oxidation and carbonization processes of thousands of degrees
160 GPa, 0.7 GPa strength carbon fiber.
In 1962, Nippon CarbonCo. used PAN as raw material to produce low elastic coefficient (L.M.) carbon fiber. Toray also developed high-strength CF with an elasticity of about 230 GPa and a strength of about 2.8 GPa using PAN fiber as a raw material, and has reached a mass production scale of 1 ton per month since 1966, while they have also developed a high elasticity CF with a carbonization temperature of 2000 °C or more, with an elasticity rate of about 400 GPa and a strength of about 2.0 GPa. The output of PAN carbon fiber reached 6,500 tons/year in 1992 and exceeded 10,000 tons/a by 2000.
Although the demand for carbon fiber gradually expanded, market demand changed significantly in the early 1990s, and supply and demand were temporarily out of balance, which affected the industry. However, the production of Boeing's cutting-edge model B777, coupled with the expansion of civil, construction, automotive and composite applications, has made the carbon fiber industry gradually grow slowly.