Trustech Visits Suzhou National Laboratory

Aug 8th , a delegation from Trustech, a leading enterprise in the hollow fiber membrane spinning field, visited Suzhou National Laboratory for technical exchanges. As the only manufacturer in China that covers the full industry chain of hollow fiber membrane spinneret plates, hollow fiber membrane spinning machines, and RO flat-sheet membrane casting equipment for the fields of environmental water purification, gas separation membranes, and medical hemodialysis membranes, Trustech focused this visit on frontier technologies in membrane materials, exploring in depth such directions as “equipment manufacturing + fundamental research,” and jointly seeking new paths for breakthroughs in cutting-edge materials technologies and their industrial transformation. As a China leading membrane spinning machine and hollow fiber membrane spinneret manufacture, Trustech is expanding its collaboration with top national research platforms.

Suzhou National Laboratory is a new type of scientific research institution approved by the central government. It constitutes a part of China’s national strategic scientific and technological strength in the field of materials, focusing on strategic, forward-looking, and fundamental research in materials science, with the goal of building a world-class materials laboratory.

Within its core research directions, the membrane materials track under the energy materials division is highly correlated with the fluid separation equipment industry—this is also the core track in which Trustech has been deeply engaged. At present, Trustech has already provided Suzhou National Laboratory with hollow fiber membrane spinneret services to support new product development. The two sides are jointly optimizing the structural design and process parameters of spinnerets around the precision manufacturing requirements of high-performance separation membranes, thereby providing key equipment support for the laboratory’s cross-scale characterization and performance verification of membrane materials.

As the lead drafting organization of the group standard Hollow Fiber Membrane Spinneret Plate, Trustech has continuously led industry iteration since it launched its 5th-generation spinneret plate in 2018. The new-generation FCT 9th-generation hollow fiber membrane spinneret plate showcased during this visit embodies the company’s ten years of technological accumulation. Featuring an original pressure-stabilizing flow channel structural design and building strong technical barriers based on more than 40 granted patents, it can precisely control the inner diameter, wall thickness, and porosity of hollow fiber membranes, while increasing single-hole multi-core spinning efficiency by 4–8 times compared with traditional products. The simultaneously presented special-shaped plum-blossom-type spinneret plates and triple-fiber reinforced spinneret plates point directly to the forefront of the industry.

Trustech’s newly developed “Membrane Toolbox” online auxiliary decision-support tool converts more than a decade of process experience into interactive data models, covering the entire chain of capacity estimation, R&D scheme selection, equipment configuration, and process tuning. Its logic echoes that of the AI + materials intelligent computing platform at Suzhou National Laboratory.

Suzhou National Laboratory adopts an “organized research” model and implements an open and collaborative mechanism. It has launched joint PhD training programs with multiple universities such as Nanjing University, Southeast University, and Soochow University, bringing together academicians and national-level talent teams to undertake major national science and technology tasks. At the same time, it is deeply aligned with the new materials, semiconductor, new energy, and biomedicine industry chains in the Yangtze River Delta region to promote the transformation of scientific research achievements.

According to a representative of Trustech, the company invests 15% of its annual revenue in R&D and has established a complete innovation chain from materials to pilot-scale testing. Its cooperation with Suzhou National Laboratory is a key link in building an industrial ecosystem of “technology R&D – equipment manufacturing – application services”: “We hope to use high-precision spinneret plates, hollow fiber membrane spinning machines, and RO flat-sheet membrane casting equipment as our technological fulcrum, and combine this with the laboratory’s strengths in large-scale materials characterization and AI-based materials computation, to jointly overcome the bottlenecks in high-end separation membranes and help China move from a ‘major user of membrane technology’ to an ‘innovation powerhouse’.”

During the visit, technical teams from both sides conducted in-depth discussions on topics such as porosity control in hollow fiber membranes and consistency optimization in multi-core spinning. This exchange not only signifies that Trustech’s leading position in the field of high-end separation membrane equipment has been recognized by a national strategic scientific and technological force, but also showcases the transformation of China’s water treatment equipment enterprises from technology followers to innovation leaders. With the deepening implementation of green development strategies, Trustech is using spinneret technology as a key link, leveraging the scientific research momentum of Suzhou National Laboratory to jointly drive the upgrading of the global membrane industry, so that the purification of every drop of water shines with the light of technology.