I doubt using carbon fiber over traditional fiberglass gave much benefit at all; Without epoxy, it’s just as flexible as any other fabric. Like you said, carbon fiber’s advantage is in its tensile strength, but the vast majority of force was a compression load. So the epoxy was doing all of the work. The only time carbon fiber’s tensile strength would have helped is after the cylinder started buckling, it would have resisted tearing itself apart. But that wouldn’t have stopped it from imploding.
Maybe it was a bit lighter than fiberglass, but with the amount of displacement, they probably needed to add several thousand pounds of weights anyways.
I doubt using carbon fiber over traditional fiberglass gave much benefit at all; Without epoxy, it’s just as flexible as any other fabric. Like you said, carbon fiber’s advantage is in its tensile strength, but the vast majority of force was a compression load. So the epoxy was doing all of the work. The only time carbon fiber’s tensile strength would have helped is after the cylinder started buckling, it would have resisted tearing itself apart. But that wouldn’t have stopped it from imploding.
Maybe it was a bit lighter than fiberglass, but with the amount of displacement, they probably needed to add several thousand pounds of weights anyways.