Polyacrylonitrile (PAN)-based carbon fibers (CFs) and their composites, CF-reinforced plastics, have garnered significant interest as promising structural materials owing to their excellent properties and lightweight. Therefore, various processing technologies for fabricating these advanced materials using thermal energy have been intensively investigated and developed. In most cases, these thermal energy-based processes (heat treatment) are energy and time consuming due to the inefficient energy transfer from the source to materials. Meanwhile, advanced processing technologies that directly transfer energy to materials, such as radiation processing, have been developed and applied in several industrial sectors since the 1960s. Herein, general aspects of radiation processing and several key parameters for electron-beam (e-beam) processing are introduced, followed by a review of our previous studies pertaining to the preparation of low-cost CFs using specific and textile-grade PAN fibers and improvements in the mechanical and thermal properties of CF-reinforced thermoplastics afforded by e-beam irradiation. Radiation processing using e-beam irradiation is anticipated to be a promising method for fabricating advanced carbon materials and their composites.

This paper aims to experimentally and numerically explore fracture mechanism characteristics of ultra-thin chopped carbon fiber tape-reinforced thermoplastics (UT-CTT) hat-shaped hollow beam under transverse static and impact loadings. Three distinct failure modes were observed in the impact bending tests, whereas only one similar progressive collapse mode was observed in the transverse bending tests. The numerical model was to incorporate some hypothetical inter-layers in UT-CTT and assign them with the failure model as cohesive zone model, which can perform non-linear characteristics with failure criterion for representing delamination failure. The dynamic material parameters for the impact model were theoretically predicted with consideration of strain-rate dependency. It shows that the proposed modeling approach for interacting damage modes can serve as a benchmark for modeling damage coupling in composite materials.