
Since nearly everything uses electricity to some degree, it’s important to look at how well your materials will conduct it. Replacing the aluminum in an object with carbon fiber can reduce its weight by nearly half without compromising strength or rigidity. It’s particularly important for getting aircraft into the air. The weight of a material is particularly important when trying to make a vehicle that’s faster or more fuel-efficient. Aluminum has a strength of about 500 kilonewtons compared to carbon fiber which can have up to 1600 kilonewtons of strength. It’s also important to compare the strength of two materials which have the same thickness. The difference depends on the overall quality of the carbon fiber. Carbon fiber is between two and five times more rigid than aluminum at the same thickness. Rigidity refers to how much an object retains its shape even when acted upon by other forces. Let’s look at some of those and see how carbon fiber and aluminum compare. There are a number of factors engineers need to consider when designing a project and choosing a material. Keep reading to learn more about aluminum and carbon fiber so you can determine which will work best for the project you’re working on. To make the decision easier, we put together this post to compare these two materials. Carbon fiber vs aluminum, a common choice faced by manufacturers.
