A breakthrough technology is reshaping the world's largest chemical fiber producer. In 2025, the National Science and Technology Progress Award First Prize was awarded to the project 'Key Technologies for Green and Intelligent Manufacturing of Polyester Fiber Industry Chain,' led by Tongkun Group in collaboration with Donghua University, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, and seven other institutions. This is not an isolated honor but the culmination of over a decade of industry-academia-research collaboration—76 invention patents, 14 national and industry standards, and cumulative new sales exceeding 200 billion yuan collectively outline China's transition from 'scale leadership' to 'technology dominance' in polyester fiber.
Core Breakthroughs: Three Major Technologies Achieve Full-Chain Self-Reliance
Polyester fiber is the 'industrial staple' of textiles, with China producing 70% of global chemical fiber, of which polyester fiber ranks first. However, the industry has long faced bottlenecks in green low-carbon, intelligent manufacturing, and flexible customization. The award-winning project provides systematic solutions from three dimensions.
- **Green Manufacturing**: It pioneered a PTA-PET direct-coupled low-carbon manufacturing model, replacing traditional batch processes, significantly reducing energy consumption and emissions. Additionally, it developed environmentally friendly titanium-based catalysts to replace antimony-based ones, eliminating heavy metal pollution at the source, and established full lifecycle green standards, aligning production with carbon neutrality goals.
- **Intelligent Manufacturing**: It achieved large-scale domestic substitution of DCS control systems, enabling full-process automation from polymerization to spinning and integrated quality control. This system, already implemented at Tongkun Group, reduces defect rates and boosts efficiency, offering a replicable 'China solution' for industrial upgrading.
- **Service-Oriented Manufacturing**: It created a 'multi-head multi-tail' series-parallel composite polymerization platform, forming a modular digital linkage system. This allows factories to simultaneously produce multiple differentiated polyester fiber products, enabling agile manufacturing across regions and deeply integrating manufacturing with services to meet downstream brands' demand for customized raw materials.
Industrial Impact: From Lab to Billion-Dollar Market, Driving Low-Carbon and Profitability
The ultimate value of technological achievements lies in industrial transformation. According to industry data, the project has been promoted in major chemical fiber bases in Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Xinjiang, and in over ten industry enterprises, generating cumulative new sales of over 200 billion yuan, profits and taxes of over 10 billion yuan, and foreign exchange earnings of $1.8 billion. More critically, it directly reduced industry energy consumption and defect rates, providing a realistic path for chemical fiber enterprises to cope with environmental and cost pressures.
For buyers and factories, this means a more stable, green, and customizable supply of polyester fiber. For example, the Xinjiang base leverages local energy advantages combined with this technology to achieve low-carbon production, further lowering raw material costs. Meanwhile, Tongkun Group, through the project's demonstration effect, was selected as one of the first batch of national 'Zero-Waste Enterprise' case studies, becoming an industry benchmark. This sends a clear signal: under dual policy and market drivers, chemical fiber enterprises lacking green intelligent capabilities face elimination pressure.
International Collaboration: Three-Academy Fellow Boosts Global Reach of Chinese Fiber Science
The International Science and Technology Cooperation Award of the People's Republic of China was also awarded to Professor Elsa Reichmanis of Lehigh University. As a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Inventors, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has long collaborated with Donghua University's State Key Laboratory for Modification of Chemical Fibers and Polymer Materials, co-training talent, publishing 18 high-level papers, and helping evolve the International Conference on Advanced Fiber and Polymer Materials into the world's largest fiber-themed academic event.
The deeper significance of this award is that China's textile industry's independent innovation is deeply embedded in the global technology network. Reichmanis's profound background in semiconductor materials brings new perspectives to interdisciplinary innovation in fiber materials—for instance, technical ideas from flexible semiconductor transistors could inspire smart textile development. For foreign trade enterprises, such international cooperation enhances the voice of Chinese chemical fiber technology in global standard-setting, helping overcome technical trade barriers.