Nantong Xingchen’s new quality inspection and R&D building was completed recently, and put into use after passing the inspection of fire control and environmental authorities.

The company’s quality inspection and R&D center was established in 2008 when it implemented the plan of “leaving the city to enter the park”. Over the past more than 10 years, the center has made great contributions to the company's technological progress and product quality improvement. With the operation of the new 30,000 t/a polyphenylene ether plant and the increase of new product R&D projects in recent years, the original laboratory space became limited, and the environmental facilities became backward and could no longer meet the needs of R&D and scientific experiments. In 2019, the company started the relocation and reconstruction project of the center, and decided to upgrade the chlorination plant of the original photosensitive workshop into a new quality inspection and R&D building.

This is an old building renovation project, and its construction faces a lot of challenges and involves multiple disciplines. With excellent teamwork, the project team promoted project construction by “learning from practice and improving practice based on what has been learned”. At the initial stage of the project, the team members went to Syngenta and other benchmarking enterprises to study and investigate, and cooperated with the design and construction units to complete the overall planning, architectural drawing design, application for approval and structural reinforcement of the original factory building. In the middle stage of the project, construction progress was seriously affected by the pandemic and extra-long plum rains. In order to ensure the safety and efficiency of construction, the project department coordinated with various parties to solve various problems in construction. The personnel on duty worked overtime during the period of civil construction. In the construction process involving high risks, the project team sent special personnel to supervise the whole process in addition to the on-site monitoring personnel

With a total floor area of more than 4,000 square meters, the upgraded new quality inspection and R&D center can accommodate about 100 employees, and meet the needs of development, trial production and application characterization of new products such as polyester, polyphenylene ether, modified engineering plastics, bisphenol A and epoxy resin, as well as the quality inspection and environmental inspection needs of raw materials, intermediate products and finished products in the production system. The new center has 21 laboratories for polymer synthesis, engineering plastics, physical performance testing, chemical performance testing, electrical performance testing, etc. It also has many functional areas, such as office area, discussion area, locker room, and working clothes drying area. It is equipped with more than 100 modern instruments and equipment such as experimental twin-screw mixers, small-scale polymer testing and synthesis devices, etc. Seven sets of large-scale exhaust fans and activated carbon tail gas treatment devices, and three sets of fresh air systems are installed to effectively treat the laboratories’ tail gas, thus greatly improving the employees’ working environment.