Polyethylene has great potential as an alternative material for carbon fiber production. Polyethylene can be processed in the economic melt spinning process. These precursors are prepared for the subsequent process step of carbonization by using chemical stabilization (sulphonation). The strategy is to adjust these precursor properties by the melt spinning process, thus resulting in a precursor, which can be stabilized sufficiently by sulphonation. The objective is to find the correlation between precursor properties and the results of the sulphonation. In this paper, the chemical stabilization is described and the results of the chemical stabilization are discussed. The novelty in this paper is that the results of the sulphonation are brought in correlation with the precursor properties. It can be shown that the filament diameter and the polymer structure (e.g., the crystallinity) of the precursor have an influence on the sulphonation process.
