Notes from the Fluoride Salt New Materials Forum: Application Status and Prospects of Fluorine-containing New Materials in New Industries
As a technology developer in the field of fluorine chemicals, Jiayuan was fortunate to participate in the "2025 Fluorine Salt New Material Technology Innovation and Market Application Forum and Jiangxi Huichang Industrial Cooperation Matchmaking Conference". At this grand event that brought together more than 300 industrial chain companies from around the world, the sense of urgency and opportunity of technological iteration intertwined and collided, and Huichang, a county in southern Jiangxi that was once famous for its resource endowment, is using "fluorine" as a pen to write a new chapter in China's new materials industry.
1. Technological frontier: the breakthrough from “following” to “defining”
▶ PCTFE film molding and cutting-edge applications: Sichuan University's technological breakthroughs and industrialization exploration
As one of the earliest commercialized fluororesins, polychlorotrifluoroethylene (PCTFE) is irreplaceable in aerospace, semiconductor packaging, biomedicine and other fields due to its ultra-low water vapor permeability, high-frequency dielectric properties, chemical inertness and optical transparency. However, its high melt viscosity and narrow processing window (easy to release toxic fluorine-containing gases) have long restricted its industrial development. Through more than ten years of industry-university-research cooperation, the team of Professors Shen Jiabin and Guo Shaoyun from the Institute of Polymers at Sichuan University has made breakthrough progress in the field of PCTFE film forming technology and opened up a new path for non-melt processing. The following systematically analyzes its innovative achievements from three aspects: breakthroughs in forming technology, functionalization of composite films, and expansion of application scenarios.
▶ Application status and prospects of fluorinated liquid
Fluorinated liquid characteristics: excellent dielectric properties, stable chemical inertness, good weather resistance, extremely low surface tension, excellent material compatibility, and a wide operating temperature range. It is a highly stable perfluorinated or polyfluorinated liquid.
Application areas:
1. Cleaning field
2. Semiconductor field - used for temperature control and cooling of semiconductor wafer manufacturing and packaging testing
3. Data center field (the most important application field)
4. Other fields such as fire extinguishing agents, perfluorohexanone
2. Industrial ecology: the dual revolution of resource barriers and circular economy
▶ Resource integration reshapes cost logic
The case of Dofluoro Chemical is very inspiring: it recycles phosphate fertilizer by-products through the fluorosilicic acid method, reducing the cost of anhydrous aluminum fluoride, revealing a new rule in the industry - "whoever controls the recycling technology defines the value of resources. "
▶ Huichang's "resource-technology" coupling experiment
Jiayuan was impressed by the fluoride salt circular economy base plan proposed by the local government: it plans to convert fluorosilicic acid, a by-product of phosphate fertilizer, into electronic-grade hydrofluoric acid, which is similar to the "coal chemical industry-fluorine chemical industry vertical and horizontal complementarity" model of the Alxa High-tech Zone, and may activate hundreds of millions of tons of stagnant fluorite resources across the country.
3. Regional collaboration: a county’s ambition to create a 100 billion-level industry
▶ The precise positioning of industrial chain investment promotion and
the government investment promotion strategy highlight professional insights:
Upstream focuses on high value of fluoride salt basic raw materials: Introducing waste fluorine recovery technology enterprises to build a 10,000-ton hydrofluoric acid regeneration base
Midstream layout of pharmaceutical pesticide intermediates, APIs and special rare metal new materials
Exploring new energy application scenarios in the downstream: Promoting the development of fluorine-containing electronic special gases, new energy battery electrolytes, fluorine-containing electronic coating materials, etc.
4. Sober thinking: hidden worries and disruptions behind prosperity
▶ Beware of structural overcapacity.
Global aluminum fluoride production capacity has far exceeded actual demand. However, forum data shows that there is still a gap in high-performance products: semiconductor-grade fluoride salts are highly dependent on imports, and there is still a gap in PVDF resins for power batteries - this suggests that companies need to shift from "competing in scale" to "attacking special products."
▶ How to break the resource curse?
Huichang fluorite reserves are sufficient, but the deep processing rate is insufficient. Visiting local enterprises found that the core pain point is the gap in technology transformation: most of the results of universities remain at the pilot stage, while enterprises are in urgent need of engineering solutions. It is recommended to learn from the experience of Alxa, and the government should take the lead in building a pilot sharing platform to reduce the risk of technology industrialization.
Summarize
Perhaps this is the profound revelation of this forum: when the resource curse is split by the axe of technology, when the county economy is deeply integrated with the global industrial chain, "fluorine" is no longer just a symbol on the periodic table - it is the code for Huichang to leap from a "resource exporting place" to a "technology source", and it is also a turning point for China's materials industry to move from cost competition to value definition.