Wanhua Chemical’s nylon 12 plant successfully produces high-quality products, and the nylon 12 industry has a promising future.

Nylon 12 (PA12), also known as polylaurolactam and polylaurolactam, is one of the subcategories of nylon and is a semi-crystalline-crystalline thermoplastic material. Nylon 12 has the characteristics of good air tightness, good electrical insulation properties, high toughness and strength, low water absorption, high decomposition temperature, excellent low temperature resistance, and good anti-noise effect. It can be widely used in automobile oil pipelines, automobile coolant pipelines, etc. Instrument panels, brake hose lines, pressure transmission pipelines, chemical industry pipelines, cable sheaths, optical fiber sheaths and other fields.

Among them, automotive fluid pipelines are the most important application field of nylon 12. In recent years, against the backdrop of the rapid development of the domestic automotive industry, nylon 12, as an automotive lightweight material with excellent performance, has seen its market size increase driven by the substantial growth in automotive production and sales in 2021. Expand rapidly. According to the“China Nylon 12 Industry Market In-depth Research and Development Prospects Forecast Report 2022-2026” released by the Industrial Research Center, 2021 The domestic nylon 12 market size is 1.02 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 22.9%.

At present, my country has become one of the major consumers of nylon 12 in the world. However, the development of the domestic nylon 12 industry still faces difficulties such as high technical barriers, high production costs, and low localization levels. Specifically, the current mainstream production process of nylon 12 is the oximation method, which uses butadiene as the raw material to generate cyclododecatriene through catalysis and hydrogenation, and then undergoes oxidation, dehydrogenation, and rearrangement reactions to generate laurel. Lactam is finally polycondensed to obtain nylon 12. The oximation method has many production links, the production steps are difficult to operate, and harmful raw materials such as benzene and oleum are used in the production process. In order to ensure safe production, additional investment in protective equipment is required, so the production cost of nylon 12 is high.

Nylon 12 was first industrialized in 1966 by the Swiss Emser Company and the German Hüls Company. Since then, Japan, France, Italy and other countries have achieved industrial mass production. The foreign nylon 12 industry started earlier and developed rapidly. At present, my country’s nylon 12 market is still dominated by foreign-funded enterprises such as Germany’s Evonik, Switzerland’s EMS, France’s Arkema, and Japan’s UBE. There are no local enterprises with the industrial mass production capacity of nylon 12, and the degree of localization in the domestic market is low.

However, in recent years, as local companies continue to increase their research and development efforts and break through key technologies, it is just around the corner for domestic nylon 12 companies to break the monopoly of foreign-funded companies and start the localization process. As of October 2022, the local company Wanhua Chemical’s 40,000 tons/year nylon 12 device has successfully produced high-quality products, marking that Wanhua Chemical’s nylon 12 has entered the industrialization implementation stage, becoming the second company in the world and the first in Asia to master nylon. 12 Enterprises with full industrial chain production technology. Industry Analysts People said that in the future, driven by the continued growth of domestic market demand for nylon 12 and national policies, strong support will be given to the development of the high-end material nylon 12 industry. Against this background, Wanhua Chemical is expected to take the lead in localizing nylon 12, breaking the monopoly pattern of foreign-funded enterprises, and the industry has broad prospects for development.