Among the five general engineering plastics, PC (polycarbonate) is the only product with good transparency. Taking advantage of this advantage, PC has been successfully applied in many fields, including electronic appliances, medical supplies, building energy-saving, auto parts, and so on.
The production process of polycarbonate is relatively complex. Only a few large companies in the world have the production capacity. Domestic manufacturers are all foreign-funded or joint ventures. With the increasing demand for the construction and automobile industry in North America and Western Europe, Asia, especially China, is increasing the scale of investment in PC production.
Analysis of advantages and disadvantages of PC application prospect
At present, the production process of PC mainly includes transesterification and phosgene. The former is difficult to reach high molecular weight because of the need to distill high boiling point phenol. The latter uses phosgene as a highly toxic raw material in the reaction process, which puts forward high requirements for technology and safety. If phenol itself is also toxic, the entry threshold of PC production makes it have a certain monopoly.
01 advantages
PC is a kind of engineering plastics with excellent comprehensive properties, which has high strength, ductility and toughness, excellent impact strength, excellent electrical properties, good light transmittance, and light transmittance can exceed 90%.
In addition, the research on its flame retardancy is quite mature. Many alloy materials choose PC as one of the modifiers. The thermal insulation performance of PC is 1.25 times of that of ordinary glass, the impact strength is 250 times of glass, but the density of PC is only half of that of glass, so it has great application potential in the construction industry.
In addition, PC is easy to mold processing and can replace some automobile parts to achieve the purpose of weight reduction and energy saving. Especially, China's automobile industry only accounts for 5% of the total consumption of PC, compared with the proportion of 20% in foreign countries, there is a great development space.
In the electronic and electrical industry, PC's high impact resistance, high thermal deformation temperature, insulation, fire resistance, and dimensional stability of the comprehensive excellent performance, so that its consumption has always maintained strong growth.
In view of the fact that China has to import billions of PCs to meet the demand every year, the market prospect is very optimistic.
02 disadvantages
Although PC is widely used, there are many competitors and high costs, so it can be replaced in many application fields.
For example, low-cost acrylonitrile resin (SAN) can be used in refrigerators with low requirements for temperature and impact strength.
In terms of disposable containers, transparent PP, pet, and PVC are more competitive.
In the field of food utensils, PC products that could be used as water bottles and baby bottles are restricted in some countries (such as the European Union, Canada, the United States) because they are believed to contain bisphenol-A.
PC products are being forced to move towards better, better, and higher-end fields, which puts forward higher and broader requirements for its new product development ability and application field exploration.
Main application fields of PC
01 electronic appliances
PC has good insulation and strength in a wide range of temperature and humidity. It is widely used as the shell, cover, and structural components of computers and various commercial electrical appliances.
It can be used to make an insulating sleeve, coil frame, electric tool shell, refrigerator freezer drawer, vacuum cleaner parts, and so on. It can also be used to manufacture parts with high dimensional accuracies, such as computers, video recorders, television sets, switches, relays, and other important parts of communication equipment. Due to its excellent optical transparency, light scattering, and dimensional stability, it can be used for a large screen of more than 42 inches It has been used in LCD diffusion panel.
PC / ABS alloy not only reduces the cost but also has better processability and UV resistance. It can be used to produce thin-wall parts of injection molded notebook computers and laptops.
02 building materials
For a long time, glass is the main lighting material in modern life, but the roof of large-area buildings requires "lightweight and high strength". The high strength and low density of PC make up for the heavy and fragile characteristics of glass. Combined with its advantages of high safety, easy installation, and strong design ability, polycarbonate roofing panels occupy a place in the field of contemporary architecture.
Of course, a polycarbonate roof system is not enough to complete a grand building only by the nature of the material itself. Just as cement still needs reinforcement, PC as a building material adds a lot of design.
With the improvement of PC board production technology and production technology, the PC hollow panel as new material has injected many new building elements into the roof, wall, and curtain wall of buildings.
This kind of board, also known as "sunshine board", can pass through most visible light, but can block most of the infrared and ultraviolet rays. After passing through the plate, the natural light will form a soft diffuse reflection inside the room without dazzling. Therefore, it is widely used in large space and deep buildings such as industrial workshops, gymnasiums, exhibition halls, and airports.
In addition, the PC board is regarded as a kind of green building material because of its excellent energy-saving effect.
03 automobile industry
Traditional windows and skylights are being replaced by lighter PC materials. The low density is only one of the reasons for this change. The excellent processing performance of plastics can make automobile developers and designers innovate continuously, and combine a highly curved PC board with the automobile body to improve aerodynamic efficiency.
The development potential of PC skylight is huge. One out of every three cars produced in China will be equipped with a skylight or panoramic skylight. High heat resistant polycarbonate can be directly used to vacuum spray metal in the production of condenser and reflector components.
In the lighting system, PC can be used to produce complex shape front lights, tail lights, and turn signals to improve impact resistance