New material invented from carrots

Two Scottish scientists based in Fife have developed a new material made from carrots to replace glass fibre found in everything from fishing rods to car parts. The inventors, Dr David Hepworth and Dr Eric Whale, plan to start selling fishing rods made from the material, called Curran, next month. They then hope to move on to carrot fibre snow boards.

The material is billed as a revolutionising performance product with unique strength and weight. Through a special process, nano fibres found in carrots are extracted and combined with high-tech resins enabling tough, durable components to be moulded to whatever shape, degree of stiffness, strength or lightness required. They also use colourful backgrounds, which have been taken from university research involved in advanced aerospace technologies.

Through their company CelluComp, the duo will initially enter the sporting goods market with the launch in March of Just Cast, a unique, high performance range of fly fishing rods offering lengths of 7.5ft to 10ft.

Dr Hepworth said: “Curran is incredibly versatile and we believe that we are launching at a time when companies are looking for that combination of quality and performance but achieved in a way that is environmentally friendly. The potential of Curran is enormous and if we can replace just a small percentage of carbon fibre in products the effects on the environment could be significant and wide ranging.”

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This was posted on Friday, February 9th, 2007 at 7:07 pm by Ysanne Spevack. To link here, use the permalink. You can follow any responses to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed.