Recently, several military and technological powers have turned their attention to areas such as "the development of the carbon fiber industry." They are competitively launching plans to accelerate the development of renewable carbon fiber materials, establishing new innovation research institutions, and aiming to prioritize the rapid advancement of six key technological fields, including engineering nanotechnology and carbon fibers. This situation increasingly resembles a contest among many contenders.

Carbon fiber is a fibrous carbon material, black in color, hard in texture. It is a new material with a combination of excellent electrical, thermal, and mechanical properties: it is stronger than steel, lighter than aluminum, more corrosion-resistant than stainless steel, more heat-resistant than heat-resistant steel, and electrically conductive like copper. Due to its difficult manufacturing technology and high practical value, it is hailed in the industry as "black gold."

Carbon fiber is "soft on the outside, tough on the inside." It not only possesses the essential characteristics of carbon materials but also has the softness and processability of textile fibers. Carbon fibers, which are several times thinner than a human hair, can be combined with matrices such as resin, carbon, ceramics, and metals through special composite molding processes to produce high-performance carbon fiber composites. These can be widely used in aviation, aerospace, energy, transportation, military equipment, and many other fields, making them important materials for national defense, military industry, and civilian production and daily life.

Although carbon fiber appears simple, its manufacturing process is very complex. Any slight mistake can seriously affect the performance and quality stability of carbon fiber, making it far beyond the reach of ordinary processing technologies.

With the widespread application of carbon fibers and their composites today, large-scale production has become a major bottleneck for industrial development. Although the principles of production at each scale are the same, the difficulty of precisely controlling various process parameters varies greatly. For this reason, only a very small number of countries are able to stably produce high-performance carbon fibers, and the core technologies have long been mainly controlled by corporate giants in Japan and the United States.

In recent years, to meet the needs of China's national defense construction, carbon fibers and their composites have been listed as a nationally supported key project.