A Trillion Market is About to Open for PVC Pipes

Plastic pipes have excellent performance. PVC pipes, PE pipes, and PPR pipes are widely used in municipal, architectural, and agricultural fields.

Compared with traditional metal or concrete pipes, plastic pipes have advantages of corrosion resistance, long life, and easy transportation. The industry covers plastic pipes, pipe fittings, valves, inspection wells, and related plastic accessories, and they are widely used.

As the core material of pipes, plastic pipes are mainly made of PVC (polyvinyl chloride), PE (polyethylene), PP (polypropylene), PB (polybutene), ABS, and other polymer materials. Compared with traditional metal pipes, concrete and reinforced concrete pipes, plastic pipes have advantages of corrosion resistance, long service life (generally 50 years, metal or concrete pipes are generally 20-30 years), light weight and convenient transportation, easy construction and maintenance, etc. They are continuously popularized in downstream applications such as agricultural and municipal fields, architectural water supply and drainage systems.

PVC pipes are the most popular pipes in architectural water drainage systems.

Plastic pipes mainly include PVC pipes, PE pipes, and PPR pipes. The three types have their advantages and disadvantages, and they are non-absolute substitutions. In terms of the proportion of the output of the three in domestic plastic pipe production, PVC pipes > PE pipes > PPR pipes. As far as PVC pipes are concerned, they generally have a diameter of less than 400mm, and they are cheap and popularized early and used in large amounts. They are widely used in the fields of water supply and drainage, communications, and electric power, especially pipes for architectural drainage are basically all PVC pipes.

Compared with other pipelines, PVC pipes have advantages of light weight, hygienic security, low water flow resistance, improved living environment, long service life, safety and convenience. High-performance PVC pipes are used in water supply projects, which can save 62% to 75% more energy than steel pipes, and for drainage projects, they can save 55% to 68% more energy than cast iron pipes. They are also widely used in water transportation and urban water supply and drainage projects.

The problems faced by PVC pipes and the way to break the situation.

Although PVC pipes are widely used, they still face many problems in production and application. In terms of the most core product performance, ordinary PVC pipes are easy to crack and have disadvantages of insufficient toughness, poor impact resistance, easy leakage, and low aging resistance. The increasingly widely used large-diameter high-performance PVC pipes in the market require high strength, strong pressure-bearing properties, good toughness, good impact resistance, and high ring flexibility. From the perspective of deep processing and innovation of plastic products, to achieve the effect of toughening (performance improvement), modifying PVC is currently one of the most effective means. After years of exploration by researchers, there are two main ways to toughen and modify PVC, one is the chemical modification and the other is the physical modification.

The application and research of the PVC filling modification technology.

The physical modification means that the modifier or filler is directly mixed into the PVC raw material, and then processed and molded under certain conditions. No chemical changes occur between the modifier and the resin. Generally, the blending of PVC with the modifier is called the blending modification, and the blending with the filler is called the filling modification. The difference between the PVC filling modification and the blending modification is that the added ingredients are often inorganic fillers because they are cheap and easy to obtain, so they can reduce costs and improve certain properties. If a certain amount of calcium carbonate products are added, the hardness of the product is improved, the overall performance is improved, and the production cost can also be controlled.

From the perspective of filling modification effect, after the surface activation of the modifier, there is interaction between the interface of polymer, calcium carbonate and modifier two by two. The existence of this interaction can cause the matrix resin to yield and plastic deformation, consume more impact energy, and ultimately achieve the purpose of toughening. At present, the commonly used calcium carbonate modifiers are silane coupling agents, stearic acid and phthalate coupling agents. Among them, the calcium carbonate modified by the silane coupling agent has a better toughening effect on the resin, while the calcium carbonate modified by the phthalate coupling agent has the best dispersion effect in the polymer.

A trillion investment market is about to open for PVC pipes.

In the past two years, the transformation of underground pipe networks has been mentioned many times at key meetings such as the Executive Meeting of the State Council of the PRC, and the demand for the transformation of urban pipe networks at the policy level has increased significantly. In 2021, the state required that during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, the pipeline renovation and construction must be taken as an important infrastructure project, and "moderately advanced infrastructure investment" has been included in the document of the national economic conference, and it was clear that the renovation of urban pipelines should be accelerated.

Therefore, it is predicted in the industry that the pipeline investment is expected to accelerate during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, and the potential pipeline market may exceed 1.4 trillion yuan. From the perspective of the industrial chain, the underground pipe network market mainly revolves around four aspects: "pipeline manufacturing", "pipeline construction", "pipeline security" and "exploration and design", and its upstream and downstream enterprises are also expected to be boosted.

There are also two sets of public data to support the development of the pipeline market.

First, from January to November 2022, China completed an investment of 1,008.5 billion yuan in the water conservancy construction. The national investment in the water conservancy construction reached 1 trillion yuan for the first time, an increase of 33% over the whole of last year. More than 90% of these investments are concentrated in the fields of flood control, water network engineering, and ecological governance of rivers and lakes.

Second, in 2021, the national investment in fixed assets of municipal facilities reached 2.75 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 4.93%. This growth rate is also expected to be maintained during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period. Water supply pipelines accounted for 3.7%, drainage pipelines accounted for 9.9%, gas pipelines accounted for 1.1%, central heating accounted for 2.0%, and underground integrated pipe corridors accounted for 2.1%. The total municipal pipelines accounted for 18.8% of the fixed asset investment in municipal facilities.

Since the middle of 2021, the concentrated appearance of risk factors such as the downturn in real estate, the sharp rise in prices of raw materials such as PVC, and epidemic control are indeed not conducive to the development of the pipeline industry. In the future, the real estate industry will be prosperous, and the epidemic control will be basically lifted. The pipeline development policy and demand will continue to be favorable, and the industry will have a period of stable and rapid development.

Source: http://news.cnpowder.com.cn/68309.html