Dark Color of Basalt Fiber Products

Vast majority of people associates carbon with space technologies, aircraft construction and sports cars and designers often use this material for the development of high-tech style furniture, interior parts of cars, mobile phones. Obviously for these cosmetic applications the most important competitive advantage is not mechanical properties but relation to high-tech technologies.

Among existing fibers basalt fiber with its dark color is the closest to carbon fiber by color. Much less expensive basalt is used as either a replacement for carbon or in combination with it. By using carbon and basalt together you can significantly reduce the cost of finished products without losing attractiveness of its appearance.

«Thanks to its unique expertise in composite materials, Gitzo developed a new High Performance basalt fibre tube. The new tube comes from a radical innovation of the Poltrusion process, the aerospace technology used by Gitzo to manufacture its composite tubes in one single step, starting from the raw fibres. Fibres are wet in the special resin and then pulled through a high temperature core that generates the tube as we know it. This works perfectly with 6X carbon fibre tubes, while basalt fibres absorb a smaller quantity of resin and this reduces tube density and performance. To overcome this physical limit of basalt fibres, it has been developed a new technology (DRI) to boost a higher quantity of resin into the fibres and increase the tube performance up to 22%, depending on the tube diameter".