Full-Color Tunable and Highly Fire-Retardant Colored Carbon Fibers

Carbon fibers (CFs) are widely used in various cutting-edge fields, such as aerospace, military, automobiles, and sports, owing to their unique combination of excellent mechanical properties, good thermal stability, and lightweight. However, their inherent super-black appearance makes it difficult to satisfy the aesthetic/fashion requirements of the colorful world, and the flammability of CFs severely limits their practical utilization in high-temperature and other extreme environments. Herein, we fabricated full-color tunable colored CFs on a large-scale via atomic layer deposition, based on the monolayer film interference strategy. CFs exhibited brilliant colors and excellent environmental durability in extreme environments, such as intense ultraviolet (UV) irradiation, accelerated laundering, friction, high-temperature, and low-temperature treatments. Colored CFs also exhibited excellent fire-retardant performance that could withstand alcohol-lamp flame burning for 60 min. Our work provides insights into an innovative material/structural design that can help achieve rapid development of the CF industry and global carbon neutrality/sustainability. Graphical Abstract