Follow-up investment - Scale up of Swedish Ligninbased Carbon Fibres

Purpose and goal

The project has overcome some technical challenges when upgrading Swedish lignin-based carbon fiber, thus reducing the risk of an investment. Some challenges remain to be solved. In addition, the project has focused on creating strong industrial support, but the industrial commitment to work on scaling is still weak. The project has thus not succeeded in meeting all goals. The technical reason is that the project´s scaling activities showed that the pretreatment of lignin needs to be further improved.

Expected results and effects

An investment document for a continuous stabilization and carbonization line with subsequent surface treatment and sizing has been updated & developed. RISE existing equipment has been supplemented, which to some extent has improved the spinning operation. Upscaling shows that pre-treatment needs further improvement to ensure stable continuous multi-pilot spinning. Some improvements have been made & untried ideas of solutions have been identified. More resources are needed to solve this and interest the industry.

Planned approach and implementation

Upscaling has shown that certain challenges will be clear first in pilot scale. Therefore, the experimental activities have been very valuable. The importance of being able to create larger amounts of CF has proved to be decisive for how industry companies propose to participate in continued work. Our design should therefore have allocated more resources to the actual scaling up to obtain a little larger amount of CFs that can attract the industry to participate financially in a continuation. Work with suppliers has been slow, but when it works, we take steps in the right direction.