Thermal treatment of carbon fibres covered with silica prepared by a sol-gel technique leads to the formation of a tubular silicon carbide material keeping the morphology of the carbon source. The conversion of silica into silicon carbide, its kinetics and the structure of the final material were mainly determined by infra-red (IR) spectroscopy. The analytical results were crossed examined with those obtained by gravimetric and microscopic methods. In particular, it is shown, here, that IR-spectroscopy is a suitable technique to quantitatively determine the amount of SiC formed during the heat treatment of a C/SiO2 material. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.