What’s New in Plant Based Fiber Precursors?

Ned Patton
2 days ago
5 min read

#composites, #sustainability, #plantbased, #biocomposites, #fibers, #resins

I saw a brief snippet in a Composites World news article (Aug 22, 2025) about the certification of Teijin Aramid’s new plant based Twaron fiber. They actually received ISCC Plus certification (International Sustainability and Carbon Certification). This is very good news on the sustainable fiber front and it got me to thinking about what other efforts in plant based high performance fiber precursors are coming to fruition. I have written about some of the carbon fiber efforts, like Syensqo’s Bio-ACN (bio based acrylonitrile) and some of the plant-based epichlorohydrin production. I have even talked a bit about how to convert things like Lignin into acrylonitrile, or to even make a lignin fiber that can be carbonized into carbon fiber.

This was the first I had heard of any of the plant based aramid fibers gaining any sort of certifications. So, I thought this week I would write about this successful effort by Teijin as well as get myself and all of you up to speed on what’s new with these plant based precursors for some of the more advanced fibers in the composites business.

Surprisingly the most common application for this newly certified largely plant based Twaron fiber is in high performance passenger car tires. This fiber allows high performance tire manufacturers to use a single layer of Twaron fiber in the sidewalls and in the tread reinforcement to make the tires lighter, lower their rolling resistance, increase their puncture resistance, and resist flattening out at high speeds. Bridgestone is using their version of these tires with the plant based Twaron fiber for their solar race car in the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge, a 3000 km (a little under 1900 miles for those of us in the US) trek across the Australian outback.

And this fiber is also used as a fire retarding material in very much the same way that Nomex is used in these race cars, with the added benefit that the Twaron fiber is many time stronger than Nomex fiber, and it also doesn’t fret like Kevlar. There is a flame resistant shield that is installed around the driver area that is stronger than Nomex and lighter weight because they don’t have to use as much of the fiber to make the shield have the same mechanical performance.

Teijin is also partnering with other high performance tire manufacturers like Pirelli and Continental for performance cars, and Dravima (The Netherlands) for high end bicycle tires. This last company has been in the bicycle tire business since 1935 and makes bike tires for the high performance race bikes that are used in the Tour de France.

I’ve experienced a flat on a road bike and it’s no fun having to stop and take off a wheel to replace a tire or put in a new tube – especially with high pressure clinchers, sew-ups are even worse. So, puncture resistance and the ability of the tire to keep its shape even when the bike is laid over in a sharp turn going 50 miles an hour or more is no easy feat.

On to other fibers and other plant based precursors. I have of course written about some of these, primarily for carbon fiber. BioACN from Trillium’s partnership with DOE’s NREL is one that comes to mind that I have written about. This is the precursor for carbon fiber that Solvay is using to make their plant-based carbon fiber. Since this was funded largely by DOE through partnerships with NREL, it is intended primarily for the wind turbine blade industry.

There have also been some interesting developments also looking into plant based precursors for other aramid fibers like Kevlar. There are some promising results coming from a partnership between Stanford and Brown Universities with an entrant to the iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) competition. This team successfully developed a strain of E, coli (yes the bacteria with the bad name – terrible when it gets into your food but a very useful family of bacteria in the bioengineering world) to synthesize the monomer that is used do make Kevlar – p-aminobenzoic acid. The DNA of E. coli (Escherichia coli) was one of the first to be sequenced because it had been such a useful bacteria for genetic studies for as long as those studies have been going on. This team apparently messed with about 200 base pairs of E. coli and got it to produce this Kevlar fiber precursor. They didn’t make it into a fiber, but this was done in 2016, so it would not be a stretch to say that it has probably at least been looked at by companies like DuPont to potentially integrate this into their line of Kevlar fiber at some point.

That’s about it for this week. As always, I hope everyone that reads these posts enjoys them as much as I enjoy writing them. I will post this first on my website – www.nedpatton.com – and then on LinkedIn. And if anyone wants to provide comments to this, I welcome them with open arms. Comments, criticisms, etc. are all quite welcome. I really do want to engage in a conversation with all of you about composites because we can learn so much from each other as long as we share our own perspectives. And that is especially true of the companies and research institutions that I mention in these posts. The more we communicate the message the better we will be able to effect the changes in the industry that are needed.

My second book, which may be out in the late fall, is a roadmap to a circular and sustainable business model for the industry which I hope that at least at some level the industry will follow. Only time will tell. At least McFarland announced it in their Fall Catalog. And this time it is under a bit different category – Science and Technology. Maybe it will get noticed – as always that is just a crap shoot.

As I have said before, my publisher and my daughter have come to an agreement about the cover. So, I’ve included the approved cover at the end of this post. Let me know whether or not you like the cover. Hopefully people will like it enough and will be interested enough in composites sustainability that they will buy it. And of course I hope that they read it and get engaged. We need all the help we can get.

Last but not least, I still need to plug my first book. “The String and Glue of our World” pretty much covers the watershed in composites, starting with a brief history of composites, then introducing the Periodic Table and why Carbon is such an important and interesting element. The book was published and made available August of 2023 and is available both on Amazon and from McFarland Books – my publisher. However, the best place to get one is to go to my website and buy one. I will send you a signed copy for the same price you would get charged on Amazon for an unsigned one, except that I have to charge for shipping. Anyway, here’s the link to get your signed copy: https://www.nedpatton.com/product-page/the-string-and-glue-of-our-world-signed-copy. And as usual, here are pictures of the covers of both books.