China's chemical fiber output accounts for 70% of global production, and polyester fiber, as the 'staple grain' of the textile industry, directly impacts supply chain security and global competitiveness. The 2025 National Science and Technology Progress Award First Prize being awarded to a project covering the entire polyester fiber industry chain signals a clear shift: the industry is moving from scale advantages to systematic technological depth.
Background
On July 8, the National Science and Technology Award Conference in Beijing announced the 2025 awards. Tongkun Group, as the lead unit, together with Donghua University, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, and seven other institutions, won the First Prize for the project 'Key Technologies for Green and Intelligent Manufacturing of Polyester Fiber Industry Chain'. Professor Elsa Reichmanis, chair of the International Advisory Committee of Donghua University's State Key Laboratory for Advanced Fiber Materials, also received the International Science and Technology Cooperation Award of the People's Republic of China.
Led by Donghua University researcher Wang Huaping and involving Academician Zhu Meifang's team, the project took over ten years of collaborative research. It established an independent intellectual property system comprising 76 authorized invention patents, 10 software copyrights, and 14 national and industry standards, with the overall technology judged by an academician expert panel to have reached an internationally leading level.
Industry Impact
The urgency of upgrading the polyester fiber industry comes from multiple pressures: upstream reliance on imported raw materials, downstream demand for product differentiation, and the 'dual carbon' targets requiring low-carbon production. The project provides systematic answers in three dimensions.
- Green manufacturing: It pioneered a PTA-PET direct-coupled low-carbon manufacturing model, developed environmentally friendly titanium-based catalysts, and established a full life cycle green standard, opening a low-carbon production pathway.
- Smart manufacturing: It completed full-process automation equipment upgrades, achieved domestic substitution for DCS control systems, and built an integrated process-quality management system. For buyers, this translates into more stable quality and lower defect rates.
- Service-oriented manufacturing: It pioneered a 'multi-head multi-tail' series-parallel composite polymerization technology platform, enabling differentiated product customization and multi-region collaborative manufacturing. This allows downstream brands to quickly switch product specifications based on market demand.
Project results have been promoted in industrial bases in Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Xinjiang, as well as in over ten enterprises, generating cumulative new sales of over 200 billion yuan, profits and taxes of over 10 billion yuan, and export earnings of 1.8 billion USD. Tongkun Group, leveraging the project's demonstration effect, was selected as one of the first batch of national 'zero-waste enterprise' typical cases.
Historically, the textile field has seen several National Science and Technology Progress First Prize achievements: in 2017, Zhongfu Shenying's carbon fiber technology broke foreign monopoly; in 2014, Kangpingna's digital yarn dyeing technology advanced intelligent printing and dyeing. This polyester fiber project award marks the first time a general fiber full-industry-chain technology system has received the highest recognition, completing the technological landscape of China's textile industry's independent innovation.