The goal of the Advanced Structural Fiber (ASF) program is to develop and produce a fiber with at least a 50-percent increase in strength and stiffness.
Many U.S. weapons systems, such as rocket motors and aircraft wings, use carbon fibers. The carbon fiber used by current systems was developed in the late 1980s with technology that has reached a technical plateau. The goal of the Advanced Structural Fiber (ASF) program is to develop and produce a fiber with at least a 50-percent increase in strength and stiffness. ASF focuses on exploiting recent breakthroughs in the understanding of materials synthesis at the atomic level, new material characterization techniques, and advanced manufacturing processes to scale up fiber production technologies that already have shown revolutionary results.