Montefibre Carbon receives €11.5 million in new funding to develop aerospace-grade carbon fiber

Montefibre Carbon (Miranda de Ebro, Spain) reported on Feb. 18 that it is investing €16.2 million ($17.4 million USD) in its plant in Miranda de Ebro, Spain to produce polyacrylonitrile (PAN) precursor for conversion to carbon fiber with semi-aerospace quality and to build a flexible carbonization line.  €11.5 million of this funding will come from the Spanish Ministry of Industry.

According to Montefibre Carbon, the new PAN precursor fiber will have a tensile strength of 700 ksi and will be marketed as M700. The new carbonization line will reportedly be one of the most advanced lines in the industry to serve as a development and demonstration of Montefibre’s carbon fiber, and will be able to work with fiber from 80K to 480K, up to a capacity of 100 tons per year.

“The support of the Spanish Public Administration is essential to achieve the success of a project of the magnitude of Montefibre Carbon, which will be key to the industrial competitiveness of Spain, Castilla y León and Miranda de Ebro,” says Alfonso Cirera Santasusana, CEO and president of Montefibre Carbon.

The carbonization line is scheduled for operation by the end of 2021 and will serve as a key hub prior to commercial production scale. The line is expected to generate market-development volumes of carbon fiber, as part of the company’s goal to transform part of Miranda facilities into a collaborative research center.

Montefibre’s carbonization line will be the first owned by a Spanish company and the second to be installed in Spain (the first being the line built by Hexel in Illescas in 2008). Furthermore, Montefibre says that it will become, even at a demonstration level, the third leading European producer of carbon fiber (after SGL from Germany and Solvay from Belgium).

Montefibre Carbon is currently adapting four of its seven spinning lines to bring to market some 17,000 metric tons per year of its large-tow PAN precursor for conversion to carbon fiber. The first precursor to reach the market is an innovative 80K tow in two industrial qualities, M500 (with a tensile strength of 500 ksi) and M600 (with a tensile strength of 600 ksi), which are expected to be available this year. The development and testing of the M700 quality carbon fiber will be carried out at the Montefibre plant.

Montefibre also has the support of the Spanish technology centre Leitat, and has cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL, Knoxville, Tenn., U.S.). Additionally, the company is a member of the Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation (IACMI-The Composites Institute, Knoxville, Tenn., U.S.).