A Salt Lake company's fabric is catching fire in several industries — because it won't catch fire.

Chapman Innovations' CarbonX heat- and fire-resistant fabric is helping protect people in race cars, steel mills and other settings where danger can happen, literally, in a flash.

As Bob Goulet, the company's chief operating officer, says: CarbonX is what people working in hazardous conditions "want to be wearing on the worst day of their lives."

CarbonX fabrics are a blend of fibers that will not ignite, burn, char, shrink or significantly decompose when exposed to intense flame, molten metal, arc flash or intense heat. The company has tested other materials, and even some "protective" fabrics either melt or are ablaze in as little as five seconds.

But CarbonX merely turns from its inherent black to yellow-orange while exposed to flame, with no melting or burning even after 90 seconds — enough time, one would hope, for a person in peril to reach safety. Long-term exposure may cause the CarbonX to become brittle.

Tyler Thatcher, the company's president and chief executive officer, believes CarbonX is filling a niche in the protection field because of the limitations of other protective-fabric options.

"The key is, if I'm in a situation in a race car and I've got molten metal splashed on me and I'm in an extreme hazard and I want a product that will protect me and give me a chance to extract myself from the hazard, obviously there is a performance difference between these materials," Thatcher says.

"We have yet to see a situation where someone was in a hazard and the product (CarbonX) failed."

How it works

Carbon fiber is too brittle to be a fabric, but Chapman Innovations uses oxidized polyacrylonitrile, essentially an oxidized acrylic. Acrylic fiber usually is turned into carbon fiber in a two-step process — the end product being combined with resin to create a strong-but-brittle material used to make golf club shafts and other products.

But the company stops after the first step. What is left is a fiber with a noncombustible exterior but a core with the flexibility needed for fabric applications.

When exposed to heat or flame, the fibers also expand, leaving little room for oxygen needed to maintain a fire.

The fabric is prone to degradation by abrasion, so the company has spent the past few years developing the proper blend of fibers to address certain heat and fire risks.

The current blend withstands a simple test: In a common company demonstration, a blowtorch turns a penny into molten material in seconds, but the underlying fabric is undamaged. A demo with a competitor fabric not only melts the cloth, but the penny "becomes one" with the stuff.