About Qingyuan Innovation Laboratory

Qingyuan Innovation Laboratory

The Qingyuan Innovation Laboratory is a Fujian provincial innovation laboratory in Quanzhou, a major manufacturing and petrochemical city on the coast of Fujian Province in southeastern China. Its full Chinese designation identifies it as Fujian's innovation laboratory for chemical engineering science and technology, and that chemical focus defines the institution. It was jointly established by three partners that together span government, academia and industry: the Quanzhou municipal government, Fuzhou University, and Sinochem Quanzhou Petrochemical Co., Ltd. Rather than concentrating on publications alone, the laboratory has built its reputation around pilot-scale testing — the intermediate stage between laboratory discovery and industrial production — constructing pilot lines where new chemical processes can be tested at a scale that industry can evaluate.

By 2025, reporting by Science and Technology Daily put concrete numbers on that model: the laboratory had built eight pilot-scale lines, five of its pilot projects had attracted over 480 million yuan in investment, and those projects carried market valuations exceeding 1.5 billion yuan. Those figures make Qingyuan a useful case study in how China's newer provincial innovation laboratories are intended to work — as conversion platforms that move university and institute chemistry into factories.

Founding partners and institutional model

The laboratory's three founders explain its design. The Quanzhou municipal government provides the local industrial setting and public backing. Fuzhou University, Fujian's leading comprehensive university with strong engineering disciplines, provides academic research capacity. Sinochem Quanzhou Petrochemical, the operator of the large Sinochem refining and petrochemical complex in Quanzhou's Quanhui Petrochemical Industrial Park, provides an industrial partner whose plants represent exactly the kind of operation the laboratory's processes are meant to improve. A laboratory co-founded by a petrochemical producer is structurally oriented toward usable results: research questions can be tested against real feedstocks, real plant constraints and real product specifications.

This tripartite pattern — city government, university, and a major local enterprise — is characteristic of Fujian's provincial innovation laboratories. Qingyuan is one of the named laboratories in that provincial system, alongside the Mindu, Jiageng (Tan Kah Kee) and Lujiang laboratories covered elsewhere in this directory. Each laboratory is anchored in a different Fujian city and industrial specialism; Qingyuan's anchor is Quanzhou and chemical engineering.

Why Quanzhou: the petrochemical setting

Quanzhou's petrochemical base gives the laboratory its context. Sinochem's Quanzhou complex began as a refining project of nearly 30 billion yuan investment, with 19 process units covering atmospheric and vacuum distillation, residue hydrotreating, hydrocracking, catalytic cracking and polypropylene production, and it later expanded into petrochemical production including a naphtha cracker with about one million tonnes per year of ethylene capacity. The city is also a major manufacturing hub more broadly, known for textiles, footwear and fibre production — industries that consume the advanced fibre materials the laboratory works on.

A chemical innovation laboratory in such a city does not need to invent an application for its work. Catalysts, fibre materials, electronic chemicals and hydrogen processes all have potential users within the local industrial economy, and pilot lines can be assessed by the enterprises that might adopt them. Science and Technology Daily's 2025 coverage of Quanzhou's pilot-scale platforms placed Qingyuan alongside other local conversion institutions, such as the Fujian (Quanzhou) Institute of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, in describing how the city is accelerating the transformation of scientific and technological achievements into production.

The eight pilot-scale lines

The laboratory's most distinctive reported asset is its set of eight pilot-scale lines. Pilot-scale work occupies the so-called valley of death in industrial innovation: a process that works in a flask may fail at tonne scale for reasons of heat transfer, catalyst lifetime, impurity behaviour or cost, and companies are reluctant to build full plants for unproven chemistry. Pilot lines retire that risk by demonstrating a process continuously, at intermediate scale, with realistic materials.

According to Science and Technology Daily, the eight lines focus on three fields: advanced fibre materials, wet electronic chemicals, and hydrogen-ammonia catalysis. Five of the lines follow a laboratory-enterprise co-construction model, attracting 61.6 million yuan in corporate investment. Co-construction matters because it means enterprises have committed their own money to specific lines, aligning the laboratory's testing programme with processes that named companies actually intend to evaluate or adopt, rather than with speculative topics chosen in isolation.

Advanced fibre materials

Advanced fibre materials are a natural priority for Quanzhou, one of China's great textile and synthetic fibre manufacturing centres. Fibre research at pilot scale can address new polymer formulations, spinning processes and functional fibres with properties — strength, durability, specialised performance — beyond commodity products. For a laboratory jointly founded by a petrochemical company, fibre materials also connect directly to upstream production: petrochemical plants supply the monomers and polymers from which synthetic fibres are made, so improvements can be traced along a single local chain from refinery to finished material.

The pilot-line model is particularly relevant here, because fibre processes are notoriously scale-sensitive. A polymer that spins well in a laboratory apparatus may behave differently on a continuous line, and only pilot production can generate the quantities of material that downstream manufacturers need for their own testing and certification.

Wet electronic chemicals

The second focus area, wet electronic chemicals, covers the high-purity chemical products used in semiconductor and display manufacturing — etchants, developers, cleaning and stripping chemicals and similar process materials, where purity requirements are extreme and contamination at trace levels can ruin production. China's electronics industry has sought domestic suppliers for such chemicals, and developing them requires both analytical precision and pilot production under controlled conditions.

For a chemical engineering laboratory, wet electronic chemicals represent a move up the value chain from bulk petrochemicals toward fine and specialty chemicals, where value lies in purity and consistency rather than tonnage. Qingyuan's inclusion of this field alongside fibre materials and catalysis shows a portfolio spanning Quanzhou's traditional manufacturing strengths and the higher-technology chemical products Fujian's industry is trying to localise.

Hydrogen-ammonia catalysis

The third focus area, hydrogen-ammonia catalysis, connects the laboratory to the energy transition. Ammonia is both a central industrial chemical — the basis of nitrogen fertiliser and a major product of the petrochemical industry — and an emerging carbon-free fuel and hydrogen carrier. Catalysts determine the efficiency of ammonia synthesis, ammonia decomposition back to hydrogen, and the use of ammonia in fuel cells, so catalytic advances have leverage across the whole hydrogen economy.

The laboratory's published research illustrates this line. A study by a team from Beijing Institute of Technology, Fuzhou University and Qingyuan Innovation Laboratory, led by Yu Luo and Yunyun Huang, developed a ceria-supported catalyst layer to rebuild the anode surface of direct ammonia protonic ceramic fuel cells, addressing the challenge of adequate performance at intermediate temperatures of 500 to 600 degrees Celsius. Work of this kind — published, peer-reviewed and conducted with university partners — shows the laboratory participating in the scientific literature of its chosen fields, not only in confidential industrial testing.

Investment and valuation results

The figures reported in 2025 give the clearest available measure of the laboratory's conversion performance. Five pilot projects had attracted over 480 million yuan in investment, with market valuations exceeding 1.5 billion yuan, while the five enterprise co-built lines had drawn 61.6 million yuan in corporate investment. In the logic of pilot platforms, such numbers are the point: public money builds shared testing infrastructure that individual companies could not justify alone, and private investment then flows into the specific processes that survive pilot testing.

These results were reported in the context of national attention to pilot-scale testing platforms as a distinct policy instrument. Chinese science policy in the mid-2020s increasingly emphasised the pilot stage as the missing link in technology transfer, and Quanzhou's experience, with Qingyuan as its chemical centrepiece, was presented as an example of the model working — a manufacturing city using pilot infrastructure to convert research into firms, products and investment.

Research output and collaborations

Qingyuan Innovation Laboratory holds its own institution profile in the Nature Index. In the index window from 1 February 2025 to 31 January 2026, it recorded 33 counted articles with a share concentrated in chemistry and the physical sciences, with smaller output in Earth and environmental sciences. Its leading domestic collaborators in that window included the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen University and Xi'an Jiaotong University, and its international collaborators included Los Alamos National Laboratory and ETH Zurich. About three quarters of its collaborations were domestic and a quarter international.

That collaboration pattern fits the laboratory's structure. As a platform institution rather than a degree-granting university, Qingyuan accrues much of its research through partnerships — with its founder Fuzhou University, with academy institutes, and with other universities working on catalysis, materials and chemical engineering. The Nature Index describes it as a research collaboration whose article contributions accrue to its participating partner institutions, which is consistent with a laboratory designed as shared infrastructure for a network rather than as a closed institute.

Position in Fujian's innovation laboratory system

Fujian built a small set of provincial innovation laboratories, each tied to a regional industry: the province's system is a deliberate attempt to give its main industrial cities a research platform of provincial rank. Qingyuan carries that role for Quanzhou and for chemical engineering across the province — its formal Chinese name claims the whole field of chemical engineering science and technology for Fujian, not merely a single company's research agenda.

Within that system, Qingyuan's distinguishing feature is the completeness of its pilot orientation. Where many laboratories measure themselves primarily by papers and patents, Qingyuan's public record is dominated by pilot lines built, corporate co-investment attracted and project valuations achieved. For an outlet profile, the laboratory is therefore best understood as industrial infrastructure with a research staff: a place where Fujian's chemical industry — from Sinochem's refinery complex to Quanzhou's fibre manufacturers — can test the processes on which its next round of upgrading depends, and where the results, unusually for a laboratory, are reported in yuan invested as readily as in papers published.