The development of my country’s PEN industry is relatively backward. It is expected that large-scale production of PEN products will not be achieved until ten years later.

Polyethylene naphthalate (PEN) is a special engineering rubber material with the advantages of ultraviolet resistance, high gas barrier capability, corrosion resistance, physical and mechanical properties, etc. PEN is a product produced by the polycondensation of NDC or NDA and ethylene glycol (EG). The performance of rubber PET is better and has a wider range of applications. At present, PEN has been widely used in films, sheets, hollow materials, fibers, engineering plastics and other fields, becoming one of the resin materials with the fastest development and the broadest application prospects in the world.

As a new engineering rubber material, PEN has a wide range of applications. It can be mainly used in packaging, acousto-optic carriers, electronic appliances and other fields. In addition, it can also be used as an engineering material. PEN has been widely used in the United States, Japan, Europe and other countries around the world, and the market demand is high.

PEN production technology is in the hands of overseas companies. There were many companies that initially studied this production technology and products, mainly in Europe, the United States and Japan, such as Easterman, DuPont, Mitsubishi Chemical, Teijin Group, Kolon, KOSA, Amoco, etc. However, among the above companies, except for Teijin, the rest of them produce PEN slices. Teijin Group has an early layout in the PEN field and has leading technology. The homopolymer PEN it produces can be directly used in the production of films, fibers, etc. However, compared with PET, PEN is more expensive and less cost-effective, which limits the development of the industry. Currently, only Teijin Group can produce PEN resin in the world, with a global production capacity of only 10,000 tons.

According to the released “Polyethylene Naphthalate (PEN) Industry Market In-depth Research and Investment Prospects Forecast Analysis Report 2021-2025” shows that the current domestic R&D and production of PEN is still relatively weak, but companies such as Sinopec and China National Petroleum Corporation have successively laid out relevant research on the upstream, midstream and downstream industrial chains of PEN, focusing on reducing the manufacturing cost of PEN from the source, and conducting PEN Product promotion. It is expected that in the next ten to twenty years, my country will also be able to independently develop and manufacture advanced PEN films, PEN fibers, PEN bottles, and PEN nanomaterials, gradually realizing the leap from PET to PEN.

There are two main synthetic routes for PEN: direct esterification route and indirect esterification route (also called transesterification method). PEN has multiple advantages and a wide range of uses, causing its demand to grow year by year. Europe, the United States, Japan and South Korea have invested a lot of energy in PEN production research and promoted the commercialization of different categories of PEN products. However, the higher production cost of PEN is still the biggest obstacle to market promotion. Therefore, it is necessary to continuously research and develop new technologies and methods in the future to solve the problem of difficult separation and purification of precursors and monomers, thereby reducing the production cost of PEN.

Industrial analysts said that my country’s research and development work on PEN is relatively weak, and in terms of application, PEN technology developed earlier than Europe, the United States, and Japan. There is a large gap between countries, and PEN products have a broad market in my country. Therefore, the synthesis and research and development prospects of PEN products are good in the future, and it will also accelerate the development of localization of PEN resin.