Jilin’s carbon fiber producer aims to become industry leader

In order to break the long-term monopoly of foreign carbon fiber manufacturers, Jilin Chemical Fiber Group launched a team in 2016 to research and develop the new material.

Dubbed "black gold", carbon fiber is an ideal material for vehicle manufacturing due to it being more durable and energy efficient.

With more than 12 years of efforts, the team has overtaken its foreign competitors.

"We only have one faith, that is realizing the localization of carbon fiber and replacing the imports and the firm's faith gave the team a powerful source of strength," said Zhang Haiou, the team leader.

The team began to work with Changchun University of Technology on improving the technology of making chemical fiber as soon as it was established. In April 2007, the first carbon fiber was made after equipment renovation and more than 100 experiments.

"The whole experiment device was independently developed by our team,"Zhang said, adding that it has won two invention patents.

However, the team took five years to turn their technology into mass production. The company took the lead in China to build a plant with an annual output of 5,000 tons of carbon fiber precursor in September 2011.

As the competition grew, the team adjusted the strategy for innovation, hoping to lower the cost and improve the quality through research.

The members redoubled their efforts to tackle the problems in technological innovations. Chen Haijun, who once worked on a core technology and had not been home for more than 20 days, is one of them.

Last year, the team developed a product with better performance at a much lower cost, breaking the bottleneck that had plagued China's carbon fiber industry for over 60 years and boosting the materials' application in pressure vessel, wind turbine blade, automobile and rail vehicles and ocean engineering equipment.

Zhang Haiou said the team would strive to transform the company into a domestically influential and a world-class production base for carbon fiber.