Can carbon fibers produced from lignin provide a cost-effective alternative to today’s costly carbon fiber production? Tyrone Wells, a Georgia Tech PhD candidate directed by Professor Art Ragauskas, will be spending a year in Sweden through the Gunnar Nicholson Fellowship Program to further study this very possibility of more optimal carbon fiber derivatization from forest bioproducts.

Carbon fibers are composed of aligned crystal atoms of carbon and are virtually five-fold stronger than steel, with only 20% to 30% of the weight consequence.  Carbon fibers also possess a tensile strength greater than titanium, a thermal expansion lower than today’s most commonly used alloys, and can even be spun into strands thinner than a human hair or molded into rigid shapes suitable for next-generation spacecraft.

Tyrone sees lignin-derived carbon fibers as a material with the potential to easily revolutionize the future of civil, energy and automotive engineering.

“Carbon fiber also might be used in the future as a replacement for steel in the manufacture of cars, reducing weight significantly without sacrificing strength,” Tyrone explained. “Fuel efficiencies could be realized even without changes to standard engines or electric and hybrid engines in use today.”

His vision is that while the mass production of carbon fibers for many consumer applications is too costly today, alternative methods that can generate carbon fibers from highly abundant precursors, such as lignin, may result in a more cost-effective production strategy in the future.

Currently, 98% of Kraft lignin is burned as low-value fuel in pulp mill recovery boilers. Issues that may arise at recovery boiler-limited mills have further stimulated the incentive to repurpose the biopolymer for higher utility functions. Kraft lignin, therefore, has developed substantial interest as a potential carbon fiber precursor.

“Research has made it clear that the mechanical properties of the resulting carbon fiber derivatives are related to the quality and chemical nature of the isolated Kraft lignin, which has spurred investigations toward economical upgrading processes of this biopolymer,” Tyrone said.

His interest in carbon fiber production will continue with his fellowship at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, to work with Professor Hans Thielander beginning late in the spring of 2013. His challenge will be to investigate novel means of optimizing Kraft lignin for carbon fiber production.

Tyrone has been doing research at the Institute of Paper Science and Technology (IPST) since 2010, initially working with bacteria that digest lignocellulosic biomass in order to produce higher utility biofuels. Using novel pre-treatment methods, he has seen dramatic results in Kraft lignin upgrading processes towards carbon fiber development, which led him to file a provisional patent last year.