Commercial ceramic fiber, need

In this chapter, the current status, major issues, and needs for fiber eoatings are diseussed. This diseussion includes the status of the vendor base needed to commercialize fiber coatings. Although ceramic fibers were diseussed in Chapter 4 and matrix materials are beyond the scope of this report, the effeetiveness of the fiber/matrix interfaee is system dependent. Therefore, system approaches, such as the use of matrix additives to inhibit oxidation, will also be discussed in this chapter. 

The number of such examples, however, is not high. In many other examples of advanced-performance materials, such as DuPont s Kevlar and Allied Signal s SPECTRA, the volume applications associated with system-for-system substitution has not yet occurred at a level necessary to pay back the development and commercialization costs already expended. High-performance ceramics is another area in which the early promise has yet to materialize. The consequences of Eckstut s life-cycle dynamics have been overcapacity and severe rationalization in high-performance carbon fiber businesses, some specialty alloy activities, and high-performance polymer composites. Thus, with critical technologies that involve advanced-performance materials, we need to better understand how to exploit their value in a commercially viable way. 

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