Issue 9/2022 - Metallocene PE catalyst for industrial application

Recently, Sinopec Yangzi Petrochemical announced that it cooperated with Beijing Research Institute of Chemical Industry to achieve the first industrial application of metallocene polyethylene (PE) catalyst developed by its own technology to produce high-performance metallocene polyethylene products, which provides a reliable technical guarantee
for the industrial scale-up of catalysts.

Since 2020, YPC has cooperated with Beijing Research Institute of Chemical Industry to jointly develop metallocene polyethylene catalysts
.
In October 2021, the team completed the adaptive transformation of
the SPC test device.
In November 2021, the feeding and start-up was successful, and stable batch preparation
was realized.
Since January 2022, Yangzi Petrochemical has relied on the pilot plant of gas-phase polyethylene of Yangzi Petrochemical to carry out polymerization evaluation and target product development of its own metallocene polyethylene catalyst, and finally successfully produced batch metallocene pipe products
.
Analysis shows that the product has wide distribution characteristics and excellent
processing performance.
Based on the basis of pilot research and the actual situation of Yangtze Petrochemical gas-phase polyethylene industrial plant, the team formulated an industrial trial production plan
for metallocene catalysts.
On March 18, 2022, the self-made metallocene catalyst was successfully applied on the No.
2 polyethylene plant, the industrial production process was stable and controllable, and the indicators reached the level of imported catalysts, and more than 80 tons
of qualified metallocene pipe products were produced.

The successful development and industrial application of metallocene polyethylene catalysts have effectively promoted the localization process of metallocene polyethylene catalysts, and laid a solid foundation
for the subsequent optimization of catalyst synthesis process, improvement of preparation conditions, implementation of catalyst industrial production, catalyst industrial application and development of high-end metallocene products.