13/09/2016
What Makes Pinarello’s Carbon Fiber So Special
This entry was posted in News Pinarello and tagged bicycling carbon fiber nanoalloy Pinarello Toray Torayca on September 13, 2016 by Dominique.
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What is carbon fiber?
Carbon fiber is literally a fiber made of carbon. The carbon content is 90% or more for carbon fibers of standard modulus of elasticity, and virtually 100% for carbon fibers of high modulus of elasticity. Nitrogen is the primary element other than carbon.
The two key features of carbon fiber are its excellent strength and light weight. The specific gravity of carbon fiber is around 1.8, which is approximately one-fourth of iron’s gravity (which is 7.8). Carbon fiber is also significantly lighter than aluminum and glass fiber, which have a gravity of 2.7 and 2.5 respectively. Among its other features are not failing due to fatigue, not rusting, and being chemically and thermally stable. It is a highly reliable material whose characteristics are stable over a long period of time – even under severe conditions.
So what makes Pinarello’s carbon fiber so special?
When subjected to violent impact, carbon fibre can snap, with evident safety hazards: dangerous flying splinters that can injure the cyclist and the possibility of a crash. Toray has solved this problem by inventing a system that prevents microfractures from spreading and avoids immediate collapse with the neat rupture of the fibres.
The extraordinary Torayca Nanoalloy™ technology consists of nanoparticles embedded in the carbon fibre mesh that explode on impact to prevent the fibre from breaking. Our current 50HM1K fibre is already 29% stronger on impact than conventional fibres. The new 65HM1K with Nanoalloy™ technology adds another 23% to that advantage, making it 59% more resistant than conventional fibres.
Toray® has been our exclusive supplier for the last 5 years. The Japan-based industrial colossus supplies the most important aerospace and automobile industries and is a world leader in terms of production output, technology and innovation in the field of special fibers. The Torayca® division, dedicated to carbon fiber processing, will supply the newly developed 65HM1K fiber with Nanoalloy™ technology.
Carbon fiber starts as a filament measuring 5-8 micrometers in width that is produced through a long and complicated process of pirolisi oxidation and carbonization of Polyacrylonitrile and is the material with the highest resistance to breakage weight that exists in the market today.
When we refer 65HM we are referring to fiber with a tensile modulus of 65 tons per square centimeter. When we refer to 1K it means that there are 1000 fibers per strand.
Using a highly resistant and reliable fiber such as Torayca 65HM1K with Nanoalloy™ allows us to employ less material compared to traditional fibers, hence the final weight is lower, although stability and safety are improved.
