You’d be hard-pressed to classify carbon fiber as an exciting new material. It sure can be exciting, but truth be told, this stuff has been around for awhile. Yet exciting developments indicate that the use of carbon fiber as a safe and efficient compound to build the unthinkable continues to gain traction.

The most recent — not to mention biggest — pro carbon fiber news item arrives in the shape of what has become the most popular jetliner Boeing has ever launched. Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner jet, which debuted earlier this month before 15,000 onlookers.

As of last week, the Chicago aerospace company had accumulated 642 orders from 46 airline customers by promising that a combination of lightweight carbon-fiber composite building materials and fuel-sipping engines will make the plane 20 percent less costly to operate and a third less expensive to maintain than current long-haul jetliners. The orders for the plane total about $100 billion at list prices — or, as The Wall Street Journal describes it, “roughly equal to the gross domestic product of New Zealand.”

(The orders also mean up to 1,200 final assembly jobs at Boeing, a figure that doesn’t take into account the suppliers where 70 percent of the Dreamliner will be built.)

Boeing officials hope that last week’s extravagant roll-out befits a plane that could be a game-changer in aviation, much the way the first U.S. passenger jet, Boeing’s 707, redefined aviation in the 1960s (by enabling airlines to fly to far-flung destinations more quickly than propeller-driven planes, allowing carriers to offer economy seating for the first time and making air travel more affordable).

Boeing’s strategy with the 787 has been to make a light, efficient, smaller-scale jet to appeal to carriers concerned about costs. As such, among the other innovations, the company is making the wings out of carbon-fiber composite instead of metal. This marks the first large passenger jet to have more than half of its structure made of composite materials, carbon fibers meshed together with epoxy, instead of aluminum sheets.**

Although the plane is not yet ready to fly (It starts flying passengers in May 2008), last week’s roll-out ceremony marked the first time airline customers and the public were able to touch and feel commercial aviation’s first large carbon-fiber jetliner, a main wing and fuselage (body) of which are made entirely out of the material.

Other than the fact that this is aviation’s first large carbon-fiber jetliner, what makes this news so special?

For starters, BusinessWeek claims the use of carbon-fiber composites will ultimately replace that of aluminum in future commercial airplane programs, thus “opening new possibilities for increased fuel efficiency, better environmental quality and improved passenger comfort.” Even Northwest Airlines CEO Douglas Steenland says “it will change air travel.”

Northwest has 18 Dreamliners on order, with options to order 50 more. In total, 47 customers have ordered a record 677 Dreamliners since its launch in 2004. Here’s why, according to BusinessWeek:

• The 787 is the first large commercial jet to incorporate an all-composite fuselage and wing — about 50 percent of the plane is made from carbon-fiber materials. The lighter-weight materials combined with advances in jet-engine technologies have resulted in an airplane that will use 20 percent less fuel than similar-size aircraft.

• Plastics don’t corrode like aluminum, thus eliminating some required and costly airframe inspections and repairs. Boeing estimates such costs will be reduced by 30 percent over the life of the aircraft — a huge potential savings for airline operators.

A disassembled carbon fiber fuselage section of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner
Credit: Wikipedia

If the design works as planned, analysts say, composites will revolutionize aircraft as dramatically as the industry’s shift from wood to metal 80 years ago. (BusinessWeek also mentions other important airplane parts that are currently being re-designed with carbon fiber in mind so be sure to check it out. It certainly makes one think of the endless possibilities this versatile material is capable of building.)

Since the introduction of the fiber into common commercial use a few decades ago, carbon fiber has become one of the leading materials used in Formula 1 car production. There is also growing demand for carbon-fiber composites from industrial markets such as deep-water oil platforms, construction, CNG and hydrogen storage tanks, as well as marine and automotive applications, according to CompositesWorld.com. Further, much has been said about the potential for carbon fiber use in wind energy systems. “The driver for its use is the need to optimize stiffness-to-weight as wind turbine designers increase blade length (and rotor swept area) to make turbines more cost-effective,” according to High-Performance Composites.

The market price of carbon fiber saw a 150 percent increase during 2005, primarily due to increased use in the civil aerospace industry. Allocation and contracts to Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner and Airbus’ A350 XWB caused supply constraints, and suppliers raised prices to suit. The carbon fiber industry was seemingly unprepared for the demand spike caused by both the commercial aircraft industries and the Pentagon. As such, producers have addressed increasing their capacities aggressively. Still, demand continues growing faster, and according to Fibre Glast Developments, “a few big users are squeezing smaller users, even smaller industries, right out.”

**While the 787 is certainly an ambitious deployment of carbon-fiber composite, according to the Wired Science Blog, “it ain’t the first commercial attempt. That honor seems to go to the Beech Starship. ‘Even though only 53 were ever made, [it] was certainly a production aircraft … It was made entirely, wings and all, of carbon fiber,’” a reader wrote in.