Opportunities and challenges coexist in China’s contact materials industry

Contact material is an electrical contact material used for switches, relays, electrical connections and electrical plug components, also known as electrical contact material. Contact material is the key basic material of electrical switching equipment, which plays the role of circuit breaking and voltage resistance. The material properties determine the breaking capacity and contact reliability of electrical switching equipment.

Contact materials are divided into high-voltage electrical contact materials, low-voltage electrical contact materials and vacuum electrical contact materials according to usage conditions; according to the main components, they can be divided into tungsten-based, silver-based, copper-based and other materials. Among them, copper-based Materials are the mainstream electrical contact materials, mainly including copper-chromium materials and copper-tungsten materials. Among these two materials, copper-tungsten composite materials are the most commonly used materials for electrical contacts of high-voltage circuit breakers.

According to the released “Contact Materials Industry Market In-depth Research and Investment Prospects Forecast Analysis Report 2023-2028”, contact materials are mainly used in power engineering, power transmission and distribution networks, rail transit and other fields. Power supply engineering refers to the construction of various types of power supply projects such as thermal power, hydropower, wind power, nuclear power, and solar power. It is greatly affected by national policies and fixed asset investment and has volatility; the power transmission and distribution network is caused by the geographical mismatch of energy endowment and power demand. The generated demand is because China’s power supply capacity is mainly concentrated in the northeast and northwest, while demand is mainly concentrated in the eastern region. In order to solve the contradiction between supply and demand, it is necessary to build a large-scale transmission and distribution network. However, it is affected by many aspects such as the macroeconomic environment and unexpected factors. Affected by factors, the scale of power transmission and distribution network construction will fluctuate; contact materials are also used in the field of rail transit, but the scale of application is small and mainly used in on-board circuit breakers of high-speed trains. Therefore, the development of the rail transit industry has driven the development of the contact materials industry. limited. Based on the above analysis, there is a certain degree of volatility in the development process of the contact material industry.

In addition, contact materials also face a certain threat of substitutes. Currently, the most widely used contact material is copper-tungsten alloy, which is mainly manufactured through powder metallurgy processes. Its conductivity and hardness have reached bottlenecks, and it is increasingly unable to meet the needs of continuous improvement. Due to the improved working conditions, new contact materials are constantly emerging, and they are facing the threat of being replaced by new materials such as copper-graphite composite materials. Therefore, contact material manufacturers need to strengthen research and development and continue innovation.

However,Industry analysts also said that while the contact material industry faces development challenges, there are also certain Development opportunities: on the one hand, the country will launch a new round of ultra-high voltage construction on a large scale, coupled with problems such as large-scale consumption of new energy and changes in load structure, investment in the power grid industry will accelerate; on the other hand, there is still a very large market for contact materials Export space, especially emerging markets such as India and Brazil, has great development potential.