High-end development: new materials, new technologies, new equipment, new brands... Multi-dimensional upgrading temper the core competitiveness

From October 19 to 20, the two-day 27th China International Chemical Fiber Conference was held in Siyang, Jiangsu, "the most beautiful county of the Li Li Canal". In the cool breeze of October in northern Jiangsu, the air filled with a touch of osmanthus fragrance, the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal flowing through the city for thousands of years, from all over the world, the chemical fiber industry people gathered together, in the first year of the "14th Five-Year Plan", based on the industry's high-quality development goals, opened a professional in-depth exchange.

As we all know, China is the world's largest producer and consumer of chemical fiber, the "14th Five-Year Plan" new development stage, facing complex internal and external environment and the global epidemic situation is unclear and other influencing factors, the industry, enterprises should balance the internal and external relations, to achieve stable and safe development? In the journey from "big country" to "strong country", how does the new competitive advantage of the industry form? This conference tries to give answers from multiple perspectives.

"China Textile" magazine will also cut from the three dimensions of "high-end development", "intelligent upgrade" and "green transformation" to conduct a series of reports to sort out the main line of the "14th Five-Year Plan" chemical fiber industry development for readers.

As the most important raw material in the textile industry, chemical fiber not only meets the needs of the development of the textile industry in terms of volume, but also is an important driving force for the science and technology, fashion and green development of the textile industry. During the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, the chemical fiber industry not only needs to build a solid textile industry foundation from the raw material side, but also needs to achieve its own high-end development while leading the value of the textile industry chain. But how should we understand the rich connotation of high-end? New materials, equipment, brands, high-performance fibers, etc., need to work together.

New materials and equipment are the key to achieving high-end

At present, new fiber materials have become the focus of global science and technology development, science and technology developed countries and regions have carried out layout in this field, such as the United States launched a revolutionary fiber and textile program, focusing on the development of a new generation of fiber yarn technology and fabrics with intelligent characteristics, from light weight, super strong, flame retardant to electronic conduction induction materials; Germany launched the FutureTEX program in "Industry 4.0", focusing on future fiber materials such as smart fibers and high-end industrial textiles. Japan focuses on the development of advanced functional fiber industries such as high-tech fibers and high-end fiber products, and promotes the industrialization of research and development and achievements; Based on the sustainable development strategy, the EU has built a technological innovation mechanism, focusing on the functional, intelligent and environmental governance of fiber products.

Wang Yuping, director of the National Advanced Functional Fiber Innovation Center, pointed out: China is a big country of fiber materials, the industrial chain system is complete, general fiber has advantages, and has reached the international advanced level, but there are also key materials and core technologies that are controlled by people, innovation resources are scattered, collaborative innovation ability is weak, the industrialization ratio is low, and the process is slow.

Wang Yuping believes that new fiber materials are the key to supporting intelligent, green and sustainable development, and the future should focus on trends such as "green", "intelligent" and "ecological chain". Specifically, the first is the development and application of "green" fiber products such as raw liquid coloring fibers, bio-based chemical fibers, and recycled fibers, as well as new opportunities, new markets and new business models brought by new technologies such as energy recovery and carbon dioxide reuse, self-healing complexes, blockchain and distributed ledger, 3D printing, and artificial intelligence. Second, device integration on textile materials in the fields of intelligent color change, flexible intelligent sensing, efficient intelligent deformation, energy conversion and storage; At the same time, make full use of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, blockchain and other cutting-edge technologies to empower the fiber new material industry; Third, the innovation and development of new fiber materials needs to build a strong ecological chain, to "strengthen the innovation chain with the industrial chain, empower the industrial chain with the innovation chain, and integrate the innovation chain with the ecological chain", which is also one of the purposes of the country to build a number of national manufacturing innovation centers.

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Textile machinery is the foundation of China's textile industry and the important support of the whole textile industry chain.  During the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, the textile machinery industry will focus on "accelerating the pace of transformation from scale development to high-quality development, building a new development pattern with domestic cycles as the main body and domestic and international double cycles promoting each other, maintaining stable development of the industry economy on the basis of quality improvement, and maintaining an average annual growth of operating income in a reasonable range." The overall development goal of steadily increasing the global market share of exports is to focus on the implementation of six key projects such as textile green production equipment, textile intelligent processing equipment, high-tech textile equipment, textile enterprise intelligent manufacturing upgrade, textile machinery generic technology, and textile machinery standard system, promote the development of 10 subdivisions, and promote the advanced industrial base and modernization of the industrial chain. Promote textile equipment for the future textile industry to expand into a modern industrial emerging resources industry to make equipment support, and strive to basically achieve domestic textile equipment domestic market share at the end of the "14th Five-Year Plan" stable at about 80%, domestic textile equipment exports accounted for more than 20% of the world.

New technology is an important help to achieve high-end

As a petroleum-based product, the chemical fiber industry has been looking for new technologies to replace oil routes, and coal-to-ethylene glycol technology is one of the most popular. Coal to ethylene glycol technology uses relatively rich coal resources in China instead of oil route to produce a large amount of ethylene glycol dependent on imports in China, which has an important impact on the development of China's energy industry, modern coal chemical technology and polyester industry. Yao Yuangen, a researcher at the Fujian Institute of Material Structure of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said: Through statistics on the apparent consumption of ethylene glycol in China from 2004 to 2019, it can be found that the apparent consumption of ethylene glycol has quadrupled in 15 years. In terms of technology, the first generation of coal to ethylene glycol technology has promoted the development of technology and industrialization boom, and the current national production capacity is about 6 million tons, and the output is about 2.5 million tons; The new generation technology has been calibrated in September 2018, and the cost can be significantly reduced compared to the first generation technology.

He said that the recent ethylene glycol futures price has risen sharply, has returned to the historical average level, so that coal glycol has a large profit room. In view of the technological development and application promotion of coal-to-ethylene glycol, he pointed out that the quality control of coal-to-ethylene glycol products begins with the oxidation esterification unit, and the purity of DMO is the premise to ensure the purity of hydrogenation products; The selectivity and stability of hydrogenation catalyst are the decisive factors for the quality control of final product. Different separation and purification processes were designed for hydrogenation products, and the residence time of distillation process was reduced as much as possible to reduce the disturbance of product quality caused by side reactions. Coal-to-ethylene glycol products have gradually been accepted by downstream polyester manufacturers, but also need to work together upstream and downstream to completely solve the application of coal-to-ethylene glycol.

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Basalt fiber, as a branch of high-performance fiber, has attracted much attention in recent years. Ye Guangdou, professor of Sichuan University, introduced: After 20 years of development, China has successfully developed two kinds of production technology of all-electric method and gas-electric bonding method, and the annual production capacity of the country is about 100,000 tons by the end of 2020, the output is about 20,000 tons, and the research and development of fiber production technology and equipment has made great progress. However, China's continuous basalt fiber industry is still in the early stage of development, basic research on industrialization technology is weak, large-scale production technology and device maturity is not high, and the industry has not yet formed a co-creation, co-construction and sharing mechanism. To this end, he suggested that the industry should strengthen basic technology research, break through the key core technology of continuous basalt fiber raw materials and the pool kiln method, large leakage plate, intelligent fiber production technology, strengthen fiber performance and application research, carry out the research of basalt melt preparation iteration technology, rationally layout bigger and stronger the whole industrial chain, and promote the continuous basalt fiber industry to achieve high-quality development.

Carbon fiber is another key area of high-performance fiber, carbon fiber and its composite material lightweight characteristics have an important role in promoting energy saving and consumption reduction, the current "carbon neutral" green energy such as wind power, photovoltaic and other industries have a large demand for carbon fiber, but the production of carbon fiber itself needs to consume a lot of electricity. With the improvement of wind power technology, its cost is getting lower and lower. Can wind power be used to reduce the cost of carbon fiber? Yan Bing, industry mentor of the Material Department of Suzhou University, proposed in his speech a new energy ecosystem, in this system, carbon fiber can be used as wind power blades, wind power hydrogen production, promote hydrogen energy vehicles forward, while the demand for refueling stations increases, it is necessary to build more distributed fan power stations for hydrogen production. Hydrogen cars need carbon fiber, wind power needs carbon fiber. This mutual promotion can promote the growth of volume and the reduction of cost, which is a perfect industrial chain for the carbon fiber industry. He said that carbon fiber materials, products, and energy ecological chain will promote the realization of the "carbon neutral" goal, and relevant industries need to grasp the "carbon peak" and "carbon neutral" development opportunities to establish the carbon fiber industry ecological chain.

Branding is a necessary choice to achieve high-end development

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China Chemical Fiber Industry Association deputy Secretary General and director of the market promotion Department Jin Gaoling has long been engaged in the research, prediction and promotion of China's fiber trend, which pointed out that brand development has become an important start of the national economic transformation and upgrading, rising to the height of national strategy, for the brand development of China's chemical fiber industry provides a rare historical opportunity and policy guarantee. If chemical fiber products want to be brands, they first need to have technological advancement, and combine with social responsibility and terminal consumer demand. Develop around chemical fiber brand. She suggested: First improve product brand awareness, build a brand management system; Understand the product market positioning and promote the close integration of the industrial chain; Enrich product promotion mode, extend brand influence; Combine brand building with social responsibility to build brand cultural connotation; In addition, it is necessary to strengthen brand management talents and team building.

Zhu Jianfei, head of the Brand Department of Guowang Gaoke Fiber Co., LTD., once worked in Toray Co., LTD., Japan, as a synthetic fiber and fabric related development and sales work. The brand of Guowang High-tech has always been the representative of "outstanding students" in the industry. In recent years, it has carried out transformation and development based on the theme of green environmental protection, and has achieved good results from brand effect to economic benefits.

Zhu Jianfei introduced the current green synthetic fibers, including the recycled chemical fibers represented by recycled cellulose fibers, recycled polyester, recycled nylon, etc., the low-carbon synthetic fibers represented by low-temperature dyeing polyester, stock solution coloring polyester, antimony-free metal polyester, etc., and the bio-based fibers represented by PLA, PTT, PA56, etc., are increasingly attracting the attention of international terminal brands.

From the current application situation, the proportion of recycled fibers is the highest, followed by low-carbon and bio-based fibers. He compared the carbon emissions of finished fabrics processed with ordinary polyester, recycled polyester, dyed-in-stock polyester and dyed-in-stock recycled polyester, and found that the total carbon emissions of the latter three from the fiber raw material to the fabric processing process were reduced by 10%, 40% and 50%, respectively. He stressed that the supervision of recycled fiber products is very key to the healthy and orderly development of the industry, and the trusted platform including the collection of recycled product standards, Internet blockchain, intelligent and trusted manufacturing functions to be released by the industry association can achieve the traceability of recycled fiber products, meet the green product standards of the target brand of the terminal, and help it achieve the goal of green product conversion.