04095 IUPAC Gold Book - needle coke 10.1351/goldbook.N04095 N04095 current 1 The commonly used term for a special type of coke with extremely high graphitizability resulting from a strong preferred parallel orientation of its turbostratic layer structure and a particular physical shape of the grains. Needle coke is derived mainly from clean (i.e. lacking hetero atoms and solids) and highly aromatic (i.e. several condensed rings per cluster) feedstocks with a very low concentration of insolubles. Upon solidification a material with a distinctive streaked or flow-like macroscopic appearance is produced. Upon grinding the coke breaks up first into macroscopic needles and then, after further grinding, into microplatelets. Sometimes the word 'acicular' is used as a synonym for needle-like. cluster https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/CT06769 coke https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/C01142 solidification https://goldbook.iupac.org//terms/view/S05733 PAC, 1995, 67, 473. 'Recommended terminology for the description of carbon as a solid (IUPAC Recommendations 1995)' on page 497 (https://doi.org/10.1351/pac199567030473) https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/N04095/html https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/N04095/json https://goldbook.iupac.org/terms/view/N04095/plain Citation: 'needle coke' in IUPAC Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 5th ed. International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry; 2025. Online version 5.0.0, 2025. 10.1351/goldbook.N04095 The IUPAC Gold Book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike CC BY-SA 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) for individual terms. If you are interested in licensing the Gold Book for commercial use, please contact the IUPAC Executive Director at executivedirector@iupac.org . The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) is continuously reviewing and, where needed, updating terms in the Compendium of Chemical Terminology (the IUPAC Gold Book). Users of these terms are encouraged to include the version of a term with its use and to check regularly for updates to term definitions that you are using. 2026-04-18T12:49:37+00:00