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In late June 2026, the series of national standards "General Technical Specifications for Methyl Phenyl Silicone Oil", led and formulated by the National Organosilicon Standardization Technical Committee, was officially approved by the Standardization Administration of China and released to the public. This standard covers the full-chain technical requirements from raw material monomer synthesis, production process control to end-use application performance evaluation, and is the first national unified standard formulated for the full category of methyl phenyl silicone oil in China. The implementation of this standard has completely ended the long-standing chaos in China’s methyl phenyl silicone oil industry, including inconsistent product indicators, non-standard test methods and no basis for application selection, laying a solid institutional foundation for the standardized and high-quality development of the entire special organosilicon industry.
For a long time, the domestic methyl phenyl silicone oil industry lacked unified national standard specifications. The product naming systems of different manufacturers were chaotic. For products with the same nominal viscosity and phenyl content, the actual performance of different manufacturers could be very different: some low-end products, in order to reduce costs, did not carry out sufficient low-boiling substance removal during the production process, leaving a large amount of residual small-molecule cyclic siloxanes in the products. When operating under high-temperature working conditions, volatile substances would continuously precipitate, which not only easily caused environmental pollution at the use site, but also led to oil mist precipitation on the surface of precision equipment’s optical lenses and electronic components, causing equipment failures. There were also products with extremely uneven distribution of phenyl groups, where a large number of phenyl groups existed in the form of agglomeration, resulting in a sharp drop in the low-temperature fluidity of the products, which directly solidified at -40°C and completely failed to meet the usage requirements of outdoor equipment in alpine regions. Due to the lack of unified testing and evaluation standards, downstream users often spent a lot of time on repeated verification when selecting products, and even suffered major economic losses caused by the scrapping of the entire set of equipment due to wrong product selection, which seriously restricted the promotion and application of methyl phenyl silicone oil in the field of high-end equipment.
The national standard "General Technical Specifications for Methyl Phenyl Silicone Oil" released this time took 6 years to complete. It successively organized more than 20 mainstream domestic manufacturers, 17 core downstream application units and 8 scientific research and testing institutions to participate in the test verification of the standard, and completed more than 12,000 groups of comparative tests, finally determining the core technical indicator system covering the full categories of low-phenyl, medium-phenyl and high-phenyl methyl phenyl silicone oil. For the first time, the standard clearly stipulates 27 core mandatory indicators, including the allowable error range of phenyl content, the fluctuation threshold of kinematic viscosity at 25°C, the upper limit of volatile content, thermal aging performance requirements, and material compatibility testing methods for different grades of methyl phenyl silicone oil. At the same time, corresponding subdivision technical specifications have been specially formulated for special application scenarios such as liquid cooling dedicated, aerospace lubrication, and nuclear industry radiation resistance, filling a number of gaps in global methyl phenyl silicone oil industry standards.
In order to support the implementation of the new national standard, multiple organosilicon industrial clusters in China have launched special actions for quality compliance of methyl phenyl silicone oil products, carried out unified product sampling inspection for production enterprises across the industry, and eliminated a number of backward production capacities with substandard performance. According to the latest market sampling inspection results, the overall qualification rate of methyl phenyl silicone oil products circulating in the current market has increased from 47% in 2023 to 96%, the average trouble-free operation time of products has increased from the original 12,000 hours to 35,000 hours, and the product selection and adaptation efficiency of downstream users has increased by more than 70%. In the nuclear industry, methyl phenyl silicone oil that meets the new national standard has been successfully applied to the lubrication and damping systems of the core control equipment of new-generation nuclear power plants. The measured data of continuous operation for 3 years under extreme working conditions of strong radiation and high temperature shows that all performance indicators of the product have hardly obvious attenuation, fully meeting the 60-year design service life requirements of nuclear power plants. In the field of high-end precision manufacturing, high-purity methyl phenyl silicone oil that meets the standards is used as the working fluid of vacuum diffusion pumps. During continuous operation under high vacuum conditions of 2×10^-5Pa, no oil backflow phenomenon occurs, completely solving the industry problem of vacuum system oil pollution in the manufacturing process of high-end semiconductor wafers.
Industry standardization experts said that the release and implementation of the full-chain national standard for methyl phenyl silicone oil is a landmark event marking the maturity of China’s special organosilicon industry. In the future, with the further implementation and promotion of the standard, it will force the continuous upgrading of the production processes of the entire industry, and promote the overall performance of domestic methyl phenyl silicone oil products to reach the international top level. It can not only fully meet the needs of China’s high-end manufacturing sector, but also greatly enhance the core competitiveness of China’s special organosilicon products in the global market. It is expected that by 2030, the global market share of domestic methyl phenyl silicone oil will increase from the current 32% to more than 65%, making it the core supply force in the global high-end organosilicon material sector.
