"High-performance carbon material developer 'Zhongxin Xintan' completed Series A financing, achieving large-scale and stable preparation of mesophase pitch. | 36Kr exclusive."
Article | Zhang Bingbing
Editor | A Zhi
36Kr has learned that Zhongxin New Carbon (Xiamen) Materials Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Zhongxin New Carbon") has announced the completion of its Series A financing. The investor in this round is Xiamen High-tech Science and Innovation Angel Venture Capital Co., Ltd. This round of financing will be mainly used for expanding production capacity, technological research and development, market promotion, and the construction of continuous filament production lines, and further expand the application of its products in the military and civilian fields.
"Zhongxin New Carbon" was established in 2022 and is an innovative enterprise dedicated to the research and development and production of high-performance carbon materials. Its main products include mesophase pitch, mesophase pitch-based carbon fiber, carbon-carbon composite materials, etc. It has achieved the stable large-scale preparation of 50 tons/year of mesophase pitch with high modulus, high thermal conductivity, and high spinnability, as well as the small-scale preparation of mesophase pitch-based carbon fiber and carbon-carbon composite materials.
The core team members of "Zhongxin New Carbon" come from universities such as the Shanxi Institute of Coal Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, and Huaqiao University. The proportion of technical personnel exceeds 50%. The founder, Dr. Li Sizhong, graduated from the Materials Science major at the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has been engaged in the research and development of high-performance carbon materials at the Shanxi Institute of Coal Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences for many years, and has rich experience in research and development and industrialization.
Breaking Through the Stable Large-scale Preparation of Key Raw Materials
The domestic carbon fiber market has always attracted much attention. According to the classification of raw materials, carbon fibers are divided into three categories: polyacrylonitrile-based (PAN) carbon fiber, pitch-based carbon fiber, and viscose-based carbon fiber. Among them, the market share of PAN-based carbon fiber exceeds 90%.
However, "Zhongxin New Carbon" has focused its research and development on the breakthrough of mesophase pitch-based carbon fiber and its raw materials. Li Sizhong, the founder of "Zhongxin New Carbon", introduced that the core advantage of the mainstream product PAN-based carbon fiber is its relatively high strength, but the modulus index is usually lower than 300GPa, and the thermal conductivity does not exceed 150W/m·K. However, the modulus of mesophase pitch-based carbon fiber is usually higher than 800GPa, and the thermal conductivity can reach 1100W/m·K.
Tensile strength, elastic modulus, and thermal conductivity are important indicators for measuring carbon fiber materials. The excellent performance of mesophase pitch-based carbon fiber makes it complementary to the mainstream PAN-based carbon fiber products in high-end technical fields such as aerospace, advanced equipment, and rail transit.
Mesophase pitch is known as the mother of high-performance carbon materials and has a wide range of application prospects. However, at the same time, due to the difficulty in its preparation, it has also become the most challenging "pearl on the crown" in the carbon material industry. Only three enterprises worldwide, Solvay, Mitsubishi Chemical, and Nippon Graphite Fiber, can achieve mass production. China's aerospace, hypersonic, and advanced equipment fields urgently need such high-performance materials. However, the United States and Japan have long imposed export restrictions on mesophase pitch materials. The "First Batch Application Demonstration Guidance Catalog of Key New Materials" issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has listed it as a key strategic material for three consecutive years. Therefore, the technological breakthrough of Zhongxin New Carbon is of more strategic significance.
Polarized light micrograph of mesophase pitch of "Zhongxin New Carbon"
Carbon fiber is a technology-intensive and capital-intensive product with a long research and development cycle, complex production technology, and strict requirements for the product performance and quality stability of raw materials. Only by having the technical level and management ability to ensure the long-term continuous and stable operation of the production line can the stability of product quality be guaranteed.
From a technical perspective, the greatest challenge of mesophase pitch-based carbon fiber lies in its key raw material - the preparation of highly spinnable mesophase pitch.
Li Sizhong pointed out: "Although some domestic enterprises have built mesophase pitch-based fiber production lines, the stable supply of raw materials is still a key issue. Having equipment does not necessarily mean being able to produce products. The stability of asphalt preparation is more challenging than fiber production."
To achieve the stable large-scale preparation of mesophase pitch, a series of key problems such as the volatility of asphalt raw materials, the raw material synthesis scheme, and the design and debugging of the reactor need to be solved. Among them, a very big difficulty is the problem of the size of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in raw material synthesis. The size of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons is related to the difficulty of forming a liquid crystal phase. The larger the planar of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, the easier it is to form a liquid crystal phase, but its fluidity is poor. The contradiction between the two is one of the main reasons for the difficulty in industrialization.
"Zhongxin New Carbon" has achieved a breakthrough from the perspective of molecular design. Li Sizhong introduced: "We need to synthesize a substance that can relatively easily form a mesophase and has very good fluidity. This is the greatest difficulty. We have solved this problem from the perspective of organic chemical synthesis."
Currently, "Zhongxin New Carbon" has achieved the stable large-scale preparation of 50 tons/year of mesophase pitch and the small-scale preparation of mesophase pitch-based carbon materials. The main technical indicators and performance are comparable to the spinning-grade pitch of Mitsubishi Corporation. According to Li Sizhong, the mesophase pitch products of "Zhongxin New Carbon" can simultaneously meet the needs of spinning and manufacturing foam carbon products. After mass production, sales to scientific research institutes and aerospace units have been realized.
"Zhongxin New Carbon" factory and products
Compared with the production capacity of international giants such as Solvay and Mitsubishi, which is in the thousands of tons, domestic mesophase pitch manufacturers generally still have a large gap. However, stable large-scale mass production is already an important step in innovation and breakthrough.
Promotion in Military and Civilian Fields, Accelerating Market Verification
Relevant data shows that 2019 - 2023 is the outbreak period of China's carbon fiber production capacity, and the production capacity has nearly quintupled in five years. In 2024, the domestic production capacity growth rate has slowed down, and new production projects have entered a cooling-off period.
Li Sizhong analyzed that currently, there is a relatively large increase in the new production capacity of PAN-based carbon fiber in China, while the demand has slowed down, leading to a loss-making situation in some enterprises. Therefore, new production projects have entered a cooling-off period. This market change is also the return of the industry to rational development: "The market was booming in the past two years mainly because the wind power industry grew rapidly, resulting in some disorderly competition. For a niche market like carbon fiber, what is really needed is to calm down, cooperate with each other like Japanese enterprises, and gradually build the market instead of allowing large peaks and troughs in the market."
Unlike the fluctuating demand situation of PAN-based carbon fiber, mesophase pitch-based carbon fiber, as a critical and strategic material, has an urgent domestic market demand, but the test lies in market verification.
Li Sizhong frankly stated that the story of the "wolf is coming" for mesophase pitch has been played many times, and the industry remains cautious about the stable mass production of mesophase pitch. The problems of low yield and high prices after some enterprises put into production have further increased the difficulty of industry application.
At present, the main problem faced by "Zhongxin New Carbon" is the application and promotion of mesophase pitch and carbon fiber products. Li Sizhong said: "This material is still relatively unfamiliar in China because it could not be mass-produced in the past. For downstream customers such as aerospace units, these terminal application units are still in the stage of technical verification and small-scale trial use, and it takes time to complete the joint research and development and application verification of a new material for the downstream. At the same time, the maturity of the process equipment required for application and the adjustment of the production line require the joint efforts of multiple parties, such as high-performance carbon-carbon composite material enterprises, special carbon enterprises, high-thermal-conductivity interface material enterprises, and the national team of aerospace, to jointly promote industrial upgrading."
Wu Yuxin, the co-founder of "Zhongxin New Carbon" and the former general manager of Xiamen Torch Venture Capital, introduced that in terms of product strategy, "Zhongxin New Carbon" has adopted a strategy of advancing in both the civilian and military fields: On the one hand, in the civilian field, scenarios such as 5G communication, optical communication, and TIM thermal interface for applications in intelligent computing centers have already applied mesophase pitch carbon fiber, and the verification period is relatively short. We will increase sales and promotion from the perspective of domestic substitution, combined with the self-developed "graphene + mesophase pitch" and other third-generation TIM high-thermal-conductivity interface material products, and strive to achieve sales of over 100 million yuan in three years.
On the other hand, we strive to enter the national or provincial-level major project libraries for military-civilian integration. From the application scenarios of military and aerospace, we will solve the stable mass production breakthrough of key strategic materials such as highly spinnable mesophase pitch and pitch-based carbon fiber, and obtain mass production orders in the aerospace field. The cycle is predicted to be around 2 - 3 years.
Currently, the construction of the "Zhongxin New Carbon" asphalt fiber line is in progress, and it is expected to be operational in August this year. In the future, "Zhongxin New Carbon" will adhere to the strategy of simultaneously advancing technological research and development and market expansion to promote the industrialization process of mesophase pitch and mesophase pitch-based carbon fiber.
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This article is from the WeChat public account "36Kr Future Industry", authored by Zhang Bingbing and A Zhi. 36Kr is authorized to publish this article.