In the just-announced 2017 National Science and Technology Award, Professor Guo Kai, Dean of the School of Biological and Pharmaceutical Engineering, Nanjing University of Technology, chaired the 'Continuous Green Manufacturing of Bio-based Non-toxic Plasticizers and Their Derivatives Based on Microfluidic Field Reaction Technology' National Science and Technology Invention Second Prize. The technology will increase non-toxic plasticizer nearly million times the production capacity.
As we all know, plastic products and our lives are closely related to the production of plastic products can not be separated from plasticizers.Plasticizers can change the hard and brittle plastic properties, to make it flexible, easy to bend products, etc. According to reports, Due to technical and cost reasons, many plastic products on the market now use traditional plasticizers containing toxicity. However, the two types of non-toxic plasticizers citrate esters and epoxy vegetable oils certified by the U.S. FDA and the EU have not yet been used domestically A wide range of uses, the reason is that more low-tech enterprises lead to low product quality and production safety risks exist.
Professor Guo Kai introduced: 'Microfluidic reaction technology is the international application of large-scale engineering problems, because the traditional microchannel reaction scale at the level of 100 microns, once the scale will lead to the loss of micro-flow field of complex organic chemical reaction system, but we Of the research results have been able to maintain the effect of microfluidic flow at the centimeter scale. Traditional microchannel reactors on the hundred micron scale can only produce one hundred kilograms to one tonne of plasticizer per year, which is difficult to meet the needs of production and market. The centimeter diameter Reactor can produce 10,000 tons per year '.
After years of technical breakthroughs, Professor Guo Kai's research team broke through the technical bottlenecks such as scale enlargement and scale effect synchronization, multi-unit system integration difficulties, and lack of efficient engineering and equipment. After Jiangsu Raymond Chemical Technology Co., Ltd., Jiangsu Xiangyang Technology Co., Ltd. and Zhangjiagang City Flight Technology Co., Ltd. to achieve high-quality plasticizers based on the micro-fluid field reaction technology (citric acid ester products, epoxy fatty acid methyl ester products) and plasticizers downstream products (bio-based polyurethane rigid foam polyol products) Continuous production.
Associate Professor Founder and Associate Professor of the research team introduced and said: "The citric acid esters and other products produced by our cooperative factories have passed the certification of domestic and foreign authoritative organizations such as China, the United States and the European Union, and have been applied in many domestic and foreign enterprises to solve the problem of plasticizer reaction quality Low and production safety issues'.
It is reported that Professor Guo Kai led the project team in the national 973 program, major national projects, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the cooperation between enterprises and universities to complete the project-related technology to apply for a total of 32 national invention patents, including 21 authorized patents, published SCI papers 11, to promote the large-scale application of microfluidic technology and non-toxic plasticizer industry transition and derivative applications made an important contribution to the recent three years new sales of 1.62 billion yuan, new profit and tax 258 million yuan .