Development Opportunities Brought by Silicon Carbide Product Upgrading

With the ascension of the international photovoltaic industry, silicon carbide becomes the upstream link of photovoltaic industry chain - the special materials in the process of producing silicon wafers. Influenced by the development of photovoltaic industry, the market demand has been rapidly increasing, and maintain the strong growth momentum with the progress of photovoltaic technology. As a result, silicon carbide industry gets great development opportunities through product structure upgrading and downstream demand.

In Europe, silicon carbide supply has shifted from traditional abrasive plate to the emerging solar battery and motor particulate filters markets, which will produce eighty thousand tons of market vacancies. China's large quantities of low grade silicon carbide products will meet the market demand. Driven by the growth in steel production, the demand of the metallurgical and refractory silicon carbide and abrasive silicon carbide is a period of rising on the whole. According to the forecast, the industry investment becomes more cautious, but the sales of silicon carbide is estimated that there are still 3~5% growth.

And the production of silicon carbide in our country is large but lack the competitiveness. Although the production is enough to supply, China's manufacturing silicon carbide products are mostly low-end and preliminary processed. For the supply of high value-added products and deep processing products, there is a big gap. Especially the supply of high performance engineering ceramics, grinding powder used for high-end products and other products is far from satisfied, and the core technology is mostly controlled by Japan. We still mainly rely on imports to make up for any deficiencies in the domestic market.

Refractories and abrasives are the traditional low-end application fields of silicon carbide, low value-added. Silicon carbide industry itself belongs to small profit industry, currently affected by various factors, the industry profit is expected to further show a trend of decline.

Green silicon carbide abrasive micro-powder has high hardness and toughness that is sharp and has good thermal conductivity. Green silicon carbide abrasive micro-powder is an ideal grinding and polishing materials, and also a kind of material for the production of abrasive products. Green silicon carbide abrasive micro-powder can be used in optical glass, hard alloy, titanium alloy, agate, cylinder cover, lapping of bearing steel, tool grinding of high speed steel cutter, and also can be used for the grinding of thermal energy original, ceramic and other hard brittle materials.

Now, the production capacity of ordinary abrasive is about 1.8 million tons in our country. In the circulation pattern of the world industrial structure, China has emerged as a major exporter of brown fused alumina and silicon carbide. At present, our country has began to implement active industrial policy and fiscal and taxation policy, to raise the cost of resources and energy use and limit the development of brown fused alumina, silicon carbide and other ordinary abrasive in energy intensive and highly polluting aspects, which is now working.