Carbon fiber is NOT cheap and when it breaks, you need to replace the entire component. It shatters on failure.
Great for F1 car chassis as the shattering absorbs the impact. Then you throw it away and build a new one.
“Carbon fiber is NOT cheap and when it breaks, you need to replace the entire component. It shatters on failure.
Great for F1 car chassis as the shattering absorbs the impact. Then you throw it away and build a new one.”
All the transportation expense of all the heavy steel and cememt is not “cheap” either.
There are many types of “carbon fiber” materials, depending on the precursor material(s), the manufacturing process of the carbon fibers, and beyond that the type of materials the carbon fibers, or the carbon fiber end product, is integrated, or not, with other materials.
http://web.utk.edu/~mse/Textiles/CARBON%20FIBERS.htm
It is the resulting end-product materials that matter, and among them the brittleness of each is different.
Also, as the article pointed out, the particular carbon fiber sheets they plan to use are being integrated with a nother product, making for a composite structure of the walls of the pipe.
Also, as pipelines are buried, for the most part, it is not “direct impact” that their stability is most concerned about.
Lastly, when reading the “near endless” manner of constructing the pipe, it would seem that “patching a break” whould involve similar methods, so it’s not likely that “a whole section of pipe” would have to be replaced.