The Carbon Fiber Technology Facility (CFTF) at the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory offers a unique, highly flexible, highly instrumented research space for demonstrating ways to scale up and bring down testing costs of carbon-fiber prototypes for use in new polymers and products to manufacture larger land-based wind turbine blades and lighter vehicles with improved fuel efficiency. The 42,000-square-foot facility can make up to 25 tons of carbon fiber each year, enabling industry to experiment with new carbon-fiber precursors, or base materials, at a small scale.
