Study of Oxidation Reactions in Preliminary Zone of Stabilization Process of Carbon Fiber Production Line

Carbon fiber (CF), with low weight and high mechanical properties, has found a wide range of applications during last three decades. Therefore, the optimization of its process can decrease its expenses and increase its applications. Although, stabilization, carbonization, and graphitization processes are controlling the quality of final CF product, stabilization process, as the most time and energy consuming step, is the main key to commercialize CF with more than 50% energy consumption. In order to optimize stabilization process, understanding the chemical circumstances and the mechanism of chemical reactions is very important due to the availability of sufficient tools to design required chemical units. Whilst, cyclization, dehydrogenation, oxidation and crosslinking are the possible chemical mechanisms in stabilization production line, the role of oxidation reactions, particularly in the first zone of process is unknown due to the nature of precursor.

In present study, the set of oxidation reaction in the first zone of the process has been investigated for polyacrylonitrile (PAN) precursor and its effects on required parameters for mathematical modeling of process has been studied.