Newly Developed Polypropylene
The current epidemic of new coronavirus pneumonia is still spreading. China's mask production capacity has been stepped up to recover, but in the face of a huge gap, it is still in short supply. China has also begun to encourage qualified enterprises to switch to production masks, and many domestic companies have responded to the call to switch to production masks.
Medical surgical masks generally have three layers, the inner and outer layers are non-woven fabrics, and the middle filter layer is melt-blown fabric. "Melt-blown Fabric" is commonly known as the "heart" of the mask. It has good filterability, shielding, thermal insulation and oil absorption, and is an important raw material for the production of medical surgical masks and N95 masks.
The main raw material of melt-blown cloth is polypropylene, which is an ultra-fine electrostatic fiber cloth with a fiber diameter of about 2 microns. Its diameter is only one tenth of the fiber diameter of the outer layer of the mask, which can effectively capture dust. When the droplets containing the virus are close to the meltblown cloth, they will also be electrostatically adsorbed on the surface and cannot penetrate. Therefore, it is a necessary raw material for the production of
filter masks.
Affected by the new crown epidemic, the global demand for disposable masks and medical protective clothing has increased sharply, leading to a shortage of upstream high-melt index polypropylene special materials. The Yangzi Petrochemical Research Institute and the plastics plant followed the market situation in a timely manner and decided to develop new polypropylene products.
To this end, the research institute and the plastics plant set up a research and development team, and worked overtime to organize a proposal for industrial trial production. In order to ensure product quality, the research institute proposes a new polymerization process, optimizes the polymerization process parameters, adjusts the amount of additives used in the reactor, and takes 2 days to complete the PPH-Y26-S industrial trial production proposal.
According to the needs of downstream customers, PPH-Y26-S requires packaging powders, all of which require manual packaging. This is the first time in the polypropylene plant of Yangzi Petrochemical Plastics Plant. To this end, the plastic factory planned and actively arranged this in advance, to solve a series of problems such as manual labor for powder packaging and accumulation sites for finished materials. On April 21st, the first bag of PPH-Y26-S powder was stitched and packaged, marking the product's industrial production.