In July 2023, the 100-kilometer carbon dioxide pipeline of Sinopec Shengli Oilfield was officially put into operation. In this winding 109-kilometer “carbon transportation artery”, the smooth operation of a domestic booster pump has attracted global attention – it can not only pressurize liquid carbon dioxide to 10 MPa, but also compare with international top competitors in terms of efficiency, vibration value and other indicators, but the cost is reduced by 30%. Its birth not only broke the years of technological monopoly of foreign companies, but also allowed a Chinese company to stand at the center of the international pump industry competition.
This company is Yantai Longgang Pump Industry Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Longgang Pump Industry), located in Yantai High-tech Zone, invested by Dawn Group. From an industry “chaser” to a localization “breaker”, from relying on imports to formulating national standards, from 38 patents to 480,000 tons of carbon dioxide efficient transportation. Longgang Pump Industry, with its “hard-core” technical strength and new era craftsmanship, has transformed the “bottleneck” list into a “localization” answer sheet, adding a vivid footnote to the rise of China’s high-end equipment manufacturing industry.
Processing, assembly, testing… In an assembly workshop of more than 7,000 square meters in Longgang Pump Industry, there are busy production scenes everywhere. High-end industrial pump products of different models and sizes are almost full of the workshop, waiting for assembly and shipment.
“The advancement of these pump groups has reached the 12th edition of API610 international standards, and the performance has reached the world’s leading level.” Standing next to the assembly line, Xu Wenchao, chief engineer of Longgang Pump Industry, pointed to the carbon dioxide booster pump under testing and introduced it. In recent years, Longgang Pump Industry has rapidly completed its technological transformation and achieved a leap from low-end and medium-end products to high-end product models. The product types have shifted towards high added value, high-end, technological, and intelligent directions, and their technical capabilities have leapt to the domestic first-line level.
“Innovation is never a flash of inspiration, but a result of continuous accumulation.” Xu Wenchao’s words are exactly a portrayal of Longgang Pump Industry’s technological breakthrough. The company has obtained 38 invention patents in total and has taken the lead in formulating 5 national standards for the pump industry. Its main research products such as vertical shielded pumps and solar molten salt pumps fill domestic gaps. Its market share in the petrochemical industry in the province is as high as 32%, truly realizing the leap from “following” to “competing side by side”.
The success of Longgang Pump Industry is inseparable from the integrated innovation ecology of “production, learning, research and application”. The company has established long-term cooperation with universities such as Shandong University, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, and Yantai University, forming a collaborative mechanism of “enterprises set questions, universities solve questions, and share results”. The company has been successively recognized as “Yantai Enterprise Technology Center”, “Yantai Engineering Laboratory”, and “Yantai One Enterprise One Technology R&D Center”. In the CCUS project, Shandong University is responsible for low-temperature and high-pressure rotor dynamics analysis, Zhejiang Sci-Tech University focuses on gas-liquid two-phase flow field simulation, and the company coordinates the overall design and engineering application, and finally transforms laboratory results into industrialization tools.
Talent training and technology inheritance are the foundation of industry development. Xu Wenchao introduced that in terms of talent introduction and cultivation, Longgang Pump Industry has always adhered to the policy of “recruiting, cultivating, using and retaining”, recruiting a variety of outstanding talents through various channels such as school recruitment and social recruitment, matching suitable positions in a targeted manner, and formulating training policies such as “position – specific training”, “senior guiding junior”, and “thinking courses”, successfully creating a core team of high-end talents.
Today, the R&D team of Longgang Pump Industry has entered the field of intelligent centrifugal pumps. By implanting IoT sensors and AI algorithms, the new generation of products can realize fault self-diagnosis and parameter adaptive adjustment, pushing the industry into the era of “smart pumping”.
From the technical breakthroughs on the front line of the workshop, to the ecological construction of industry-university-research collaboration, to the inheritance of the talent echelon, this specialized and sophisticated “little giant” enterprises that produce new and unique products is using innovation as a pen to write more “Chinese answers” on the blueprint of high-end equipment manufacturing.
