Fabrication and application of short carbon fibers using asphaltene-based carbon precursors

This proposal is aimed at developing cost-effective methods of fabricating short carbon fibers (CFs) or chopped CFs using Alberta asphaltenes as carbon precursors for the following two categories of applications:

1) Short CFs used for making reinforced composite materials with either concrete-, plastic-, ceramic- or metal-matrixes, for which efforts will be made to improve the mechanical properties of the short CFs and their composites.
2) Short CFs used for making electrode materials for energy storage, for which fabrication of short CFs is focused on improving their chemical and electrochemical properties and energy storage performance.