On the morning of August 24, the ultra-thin flexible glass project with a total investment of 200 million yuan by SDRG New Materials Co., Ltd. was officially put into operation.
Flexible glass is a strategic emerging material. Glass is hard and brittle, and it is easily broken. However, when the thickness is less than 100μm, the glass has good flexibility, can be bent and folded, and still maintains the advantages of transparency, scratch resistance, and corrosion resistance. Therefore, the emergence of flexible glass has immediately become a key supporting material for products such as 5G folding mobile phones and flexible computers. However, the development of flexible glass is also very difficult. The difficulty lies in its thinness, width, uniform thickness, and almost zero tolerance for defects such as bubbles, streaks, and cracks. At present, there are very few countries that master this technology, and the market is basically monopolized by South Korean Samsung.
In December 2019, SDRG established a project team dedicated to the research and development of flexible glass. After two years of preliminary experiments and verification, the research and development team has overcome the core technologies of glass frit, glass melting, sheet root forming, and gradient drawing furnace.
Since the construction of the ultra-thin flexible glass project started at the end of December last year, it took 8 months to complete the construction of a complete set of equipment such as batching, melting furnace, draw furnace, and clean room, and build the first domestic high-end flexible glass cover production line. With independent intellectual property rights, it fills the gap in China's thermal flexible glass production line.
The ultra-thin flexible glass project adopts production processes such as "melting and down-forming" to develop flexible glass with a thickness of 0.07mm that can meet market application requirements.
After the project is officially put into operation, it will be able to form an annual production capacity of 300,000 square meters of flexible glass cover for foldable displays. Shandong Rouguang New Materials will have a more comprehensive core technology for flexible glass manufacturing, breaking foreign monopolies, and strengthening China`s discourse on flexible glass products. Power and initiative.