Carbon fiber fabric is like flexible, versatile steel when used to help protect a pedestrian tunnel on the University of Arizona campus. Explorer News reports:
Ten feet beneath the pavement where students walk and bike on their way to class, workers clad in yellow protection suits, goggles and disposable gloves crowd inside a tunnel, attaching what appears to be wallpaper to the inside. But the sheets they’re tacking up are not paper and the adhesive they’re using is not glue. They are affixing woven carbon fiber mats soaked in epoxy resin, which drips from the ceiling as they work. When it’s dry, the layer they have applied will fortify the tunnel with a strength greater than steel.
Developed at the UA as a way of retrofitting buildings and structures against earthquakes, the carbon fiber lining is being used in a pilot project to restore and reinforce a utility tunnel that runs between the Student Union Memorial Center to the Chemical Sciences building, 850 feet across the Mall.