The main technological bottlenecks faced by the graphite electrode industry are as follows:
Purity and Performance Stability: Semiconductor manufacturing demands extremely high purity levels for high-purity graphite (typically requiring over 99.999%). However, domestic enterprises still face challenges in controlling impurities strictly and ensuring batch stability during large-scale production, leading to reliance on imports for some high-end products. For instance, the manufacturing of 3nm process chips requires ultra-high-purity graphite with an ash content of ≤5ppm as the thermal field material. If the purity fails to meet the standard, impurity ions can cause the wafer leakage rate to surge by over 300%.
Machining Precision and Cost: Graphite used in semiconductors needs to possess high-precision machining characteristics (such as heaters and crucibles in wafer manufacturing). However, domestic enterprises lag behind international leaders like Germany’s SGL and Japan’s Toyo Tanso in high-precision molding and surface treatment technologies, resulting in higher machining costs.
Environmental Pressure: The cost of treating acidic wastewater generated during graphite purification has risen sharply, putting some small and medium-sized enterprises under pressure to limit production due to insufficient investment in environmental protection equipment. Wastewater treatment costs account for over 20% of production costs, further squeezing profit margins.
Dependence on Imported High-End Equipment: Key equipment such as ultra-high-temperature furnaces relies on imports, limiting the autonomy of domestic enterprises in technological research and development and capacity expansion, and keeping production costs high.
Raw Material Quality and Stability: There is a gap in the quality and stability of domestic raw materials used for producing ultra-high-power graphite electrodes compared to foreign counterparts. Foreign raw materials offer stable sources and reliable quality, whereas domestic raw materials struggle to meet the demands of high-end products.
Process Control Challenges:
- Incorrect Temperature Measurement Points: This affects temperature control during production, thereby impacting product quality.
- Filling Material Issues: Using wet materials as fillers or having filler particle sizes that are too fine or coarse affects the density and strength of the products.
- Binder Problems: Many manufacturers have insufficient understanding of binders, focusing only on the softening point without checking other indicators. Additionally, during production, the binder is only melted without a settling process, leading to a large number of defective products during molding and baking.
- Blending Issues: Significant variations in particle materials make it difficult to ensure the stability of the paste. Excessive blending amounts, overly fine powder, improper use of dust collection powder, and unreasonable particle size formulations affect the uniformity and performance of the products.
- Mixing Problems: Issues such as mixing with wet materials, unreasonable heat conduction oil piping systems and mixing temperatures, excessively long dry mixing times, improper spacing between the stirring blade and the pot bottom, overly large raw fragment sizes, and excessive addition of binders affect the uniformity and quality of the mixed materials.
- Extrusion Molding Problems: Using small presses to extrude large-sized products, the absence of vacuum extraction, lack of synchronized shearing, and failure to replace worn linings in a timely manner lead to dimensional deviations and internal defects in the products.
- Impregnation Problems: Inadequate cleaning of baked products, uneven preheating temperatures, and poor vacuum extraction affect the density and performance of the products.
- Graphitization Problems: Issues such as excessive furnace loading, mismatched transformer parameters with furnace size, and unreasonable pre-tightening pressures during internal string graphitization affect the graphitization degree and performance of the products.
- Finished Product Machining Problems: Issues like poor rigidity of lathes and mismatches between graphite electrode bodies and connectors result in insufficient machining precision, making the products prone to breakage during use.
Post time: Aug-19-2025