Why is carbon fiber used in metrology and scientific equipment?
Carbon fiber is favored in metrology and scientific equipment due to its high dimensional stability and low thermal expansion. Unlike metals, carbon fiber components remain virtually unchanged over a wide temperature range, minimizing measurement errors caused by thermal expansion or contraction. Standard carbon fiber parts can achieve a coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) as low as 1.5 x 10-6 /K, similar to Invar steel, making them ideal for precision measurement tools and scientific structures. Note: For applications requiring even lower CTE, custom laminate designs are necessary, which may increase complexity and lead time.
Carbon fiber is rapidly becoming one of the choice materials in the field of metrology due to its high stability and low thermal expansion. In applications where thermal changes will move comparable metal measurement and alignment tools out of tolerance due to expansion or contraction of the material, carbon fiber will remain virtually unchanged over a wide temperature range. A standard carbon fiber part can readily be made with a CTE of 1.5 x 10-6 /K, or approximately the same as Invar steel, making it an ideal candidate for both metrology tools, as well as scientific equipment (for example, telescope lens support structure or mounting plates for lasers and mirrors).
Customized carbon fiber components can be designed with even lower CTE values down to 5 x 10-7 /K by preferentially aligning high modulus uni-directional prepregs, thus creating a part that has tailored, albeit varying, CTE values along different axes. One example of this is support beams for x-ray cyclotron sensors and equipment, where the majority of the carbon fibers are aligned along a single axis with the goal of reducing the CTE in one direction as much as possible. Although the CTE in the orthogonal direction becomes higher (i.e. it is sacrificed to a certain degree), in these applications it is often necessary to bring the vertical CTE component as close to zero as possible to prevent signal noise due to temperature fluctuations.
Dragonplate off-the-shelf materials, such as 
