Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer for Cable Structures—A Review

TLDR

Carbon fiber reinforced polymer offers high strength, light weight, corrosion resistance, and fatigue durability, making unidirectional CFRP a promising alternative to steel cables, though its orthotropic properties create anchoring challenges due to weaker transverse strength. The paper reviews the use of CFRP cables in cable structures, covering history, current state, and future prospects. The authors survey CFRP cable properties, mechanical behavior, structural configurations, and existing cable‑bridge implementations, detailing anchor designs and highlighting remaining challenges. The review identifies emerging uses such as cable roofs and facades, presenting a prototype roof and a conceptual CFRP continuous band winding system.

Abstract

Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) is an advanced composite material with the advantages of high strength, lightweight, no corrosion and excellent fatigue resistance. Therefore, unidirectional CFRP has great potential for cables and to replace steel cables in cable structures. However, CFRP is a typical orthotropic material and its strength and modulus perpendicular to the fiber direction are much lower than those in the fiber direction, which brings a challenge for anchoring CFRP cables. This paper presents an overview of application of CFRP cables in cable structures, including historical review, state of the art and prospects for the future. After introducing properties of carbon fibers, mechanical characteristics and structural forms of CFRP cables, existing CFRP cable structures in the world (all of them are cable bridges) are reviewed. Especially, their CFRP cable anchorages are presented in detail. New applications for CFRP cables, i.e., cable roofs and cable facades, are also presented, including the introduction of a prototype CFRP cable roof and the conceptual design of a novel structure—CFRP Continuous Band Winding System. In addition, other challenges that impede widespread application of CFRP cable structures are briefly introduced.