Profile
Yang Bin, born in May 1965 in Yuanmou, Yunnan, is an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and president of Kunming University of Science and Technology. He has worked in nonferrous-metallurgy education and research for more than 30 years, led the building of China's first batch - and the first at any university - of national engineering laboratories, driven iterative upgrades of production technologies for more than ten rare metals, and dedicated himself to securing the supply of China's strategic key metals. His technologies are applied by more than 180 enterprises at home and abroad, carrying China's vacuum metallurgy from follower to leader. He has won three second-class National Science and Technology Awards and honors including National Outstanding Science and Technology Worker, "Yunling Model" and the Xingdian Talent Award.
Though summer vacation is underway, the pace of research at the university's National Engineering Research Center for Vacuum Metallurgy has not slowed in the slightest.
Inside a high-temperature vacuum furnace chamber, in a sealed environment above a thousand degrees Celsius, industrial tailings containing iron, tungsten, tin and other metals undergo vacuum-smelting separation; researchers then use hydrometallurgical separation techniques to precipitate a batch of high-purity valuable metals in orderly fashion.
This is a milestone achievement of the center's research group on recovering valuable metals from iron-tungsten-tin tailings. The combined "vacuum distillation plus hydrometallurgical separation" technology achieves efficient separation and enrichment of multiple rare and precious metals, offering a new method for the resource utilization of complex, hard-to-treat tailings and for the green, low-carbon transformation of the metallurgical industry.
Once, Chinese scholars traveled overseas to learn vacuum metallurgy yet could not even enter factory gates; today, more than 90% of the world's tin smelters compete to install "Chinese furnaces," and complete vacuum-metallurgy technologies have landed at more than 180 enterprises at home and abroad, generating annual output value in the tens of billions of yuan.
The chief driver of those complete technologies, academician and university president Yang Bin, has plowed this field for more than 30 years, leading his team through a series of key breakthroughs - from "sitting on a cold bench" to the world's front ranks, carrying China's vacuum metallurgy from following, to keeping pace, to leading.
"Because It Was Hard, I Was All the More Determined to Stay"
In 1987, Yang Bin entered graduate school at Kunming Institute of Technology (predecessor of today's university) under Dai Yongnian, China's leading expert in nonferrous vacuum metallurgy. Three years later, at graduation, the metallurgy industry hit a "deep winter": many researchers went into business or switched to hotter fields.
The industry was struggling, and vacuum metallurgy - new but obscure - could barely survive: the institute founded by Dai Yongnian shrank from dozens of full-time researchers to just seven or eight. Stay with his mentor researching vacuum metallurgy, or take a high salary in industry? Yang Bin hesitated too.
"Don't rush your decision," Dai Yongnian said, calling him over. "Go take a look at the plants first."
Yang Bin ended up spending several months in a traditional metallurgy workshop. Smoke filled the shop floor as workers in heavy protective gear operated the equipment. Watching the scene, a sense of responsibility rose in him: "If smelting could be carried out in a vacuum, none of these problems would exist."
Standing at the crossroads of his career, Yang Bin found his firm answer: "Because it is hard, I must stay!"
The principle of vacuum metallurgy is not complicated. Metal is heated in a sealed vacuum chamber until it vaporizes, then separated through condensation - much like making distilled water. Vacuum metallurgy prevents metals from oxidizing in the air, effectively removes internal impurities, and yields purer metal with more stable properties.
But boiling water is easy; "boiling" metal is hard. Vacuum metallurgy requires hundreds or even more than a thousand degrees Celsius. Can the equipment run stably? Can materials withstand the heat? Can the vessel remain gas-tight? Can production run continuously? Every question is a threshold, and the crux is reliable smelting equipment. In the 1990s, the team's prototypes kept "going on strike," shutting down for repairs every few days.
Was there experience to borrow? Yang Bin went abroad for further study. His hosts provided plenty of literature, which he devoured, asking questions whenever they arose. Yet the plants that actually used vacuum metallurgy barred him from entering, and core technology remained out of reach.
"The More Trial and Error in the Lab, the Fewer Failures in Industrial Application"
Core technology can neither be bought nor learned - what then? "Research is done, not wished into being!" Yang Bin said. Without advanced equipment, the team designed, installed and debugged its own; without mature parameters, they ran experiment after experiment; without ready-made experience, they rooted themselves on workshop floors, eating and working alongside the workers.
"Where does experience come from? Trial and error!" Yang Bin said. Any experiment must pass through repeated failures - sometimes one or two years of them - before a workable method emerges. "In the end it proved true: the more trials you make in the lab, the smaller the chance of error when it reaches industrial application."
Tempered a thousand times over, the team finally cracked the "hard bone" of vacuum-metallurgy equipment. High-temperature resistance, corrosion resistance, continuous production, large-scale equipment - a series of bottleneck problems were solved one by one, and a new generation of key technologies and core equipment with fully independent intellectual property rights was born. Furnace throughput leapt accordingly.
The leaps did not stop there. One company proposed building a large vacuum unit handling 50 tonnes of material per day - unprecedented in the industry worldwide. Facing this "no man's land," Yang Bin's team rose to the challenge once again.
This time, Yang Bin chose the most laborious yet most rigorous method - running an industrial trial at full 1:1 scale in the university laboratory. Design, fabrication, debugging, advancing through round after round of trials. In 2020, the 50-tonne-class large continuous vacuum-distillation unit went into operation on schedule, marking China's tin-smelting technology as world-class. Today, the series of green-metallurgy technologies developed by Yang Bin's team has built more than 300 production lines at over 150 domestic enterprises, and the results have spread overseas.
If one word could describe the spirit of research, Yang Bin believes it is "tempered a thousand times." "Facing bottleneck problems, you must attack them again and again, breaking through barrier after barrier - key technology must be held firmly in your own hands!" he said.
"Research Can Serve the Country; Teaching Passes the Torch On"
After being elected an academician and becoming university president, Yang Bin still works on the front lines of teaching and research, lecturing on metallurgical-engineering fundamentals and specialty courses and leading students in research. In class he often uses "bottleneck" technologies as examples, reminding students that research must serve national strategy.
Kong Lingxin, a doctoral student of Yang Bin who graduated in 2016 and is now a professor and doctoral supervisor at the university's School of Metallurgy and Energy, still remembers the words Yang often repeats: "Research topics must come from practice and return to practice."
"Vacuum metallurgy is a systems-engineering endeavor; many experiments can only be completed through team cooperation." Yang Bin pays special attention to cultivating his students' collaborative spirit, setting ground rules: the group's study room must be left with "desks clean when people leave," and meeting rooms must be restored after use. "It is precisely through such small things that a sense of responsibility and team spirit are formed," he said.
Encouraging undergraduates into the laboratory and graduate students to choose their own topics, Yang Bin insists on letting young people build real skills and solve real problems in practice. Once, when Kong Lingxin ran into difficulty in a high-temperature crystallization experiment on tin alloy, Yang Bin - just back from a business trip - came to the laboratory early the next morning despite his fatigue and spent an entire day analyzing and demonstrating until the problem was solved.
When one student's negligence ruined an experiment and scrapped thousands of yuan of materials, Yang Bin offered not a word of reproach. "Making mistakes is a necessary part of a student's growth," he said.
"Papers should be written on the land, classes should be held in workshops, medals should be hung on the equipment." In Yang Bin's view, laboratory results should not stay on paper but take root in industry and become real, tangible productivity. Behind him, generation after generation of "metallurgists" carry on the struggle, "turning stone into gold" in a vacuum world.
Yang Bin also encourages students to start their own businesses. With his help, one graduate founded a company in Kunming producing lithium metal strip, with only 20 to 30 employees but annual revenue of more than 300 million yuan. "Small as the company is, it has studied lithium strip to the bottom, supplying key materials to many domestic new-energy enterprises," Yang said. Another doctoral student, under Yang's guidance, started a business converting laboratory results into applications - green, short-route, low-cost recovery of indium and tin from ITO waste, producing tin-sulfide friction materials, optoelectronic functional materials, high-purity indium and new indium-based materials - and it is now a "unicorn" enterprise in its niche.
Yang Bin hopes to play the roles of "extension line" and "auxiliary line": on one hand, leading the team to keep extending the depth and boundaries of research, continuously reaching further into scientific exploration; on the other, providing logistical support and coordinating resources so that everyone can devote themselves to research without distraction.
"Research can serve the country, and teaching can pass that mission on to the next generation," Yang Bin said. "There are still many metallic elements on the periodic table waiting for the team to explore!"
Reporter's Notes: Nurturing a Research Spirit That Refuses to Lose
"Research is done!" During the interview, Yang Bin's words rang out powerfully, striking straight at the heart.
Looking back on the road traveled, that single word "done" embodies the pioneering spirit of Dai Yongnian, China's vacuum-metallurgy pioneer, who spent twenty-one years perfecting one furnace in an era of material scarcity; and the tenacious strength of Yang Bin, who, facing tight foreign technology blockades with nowhere to turn for know-how, used the "clumsiest" method - rooting himself in laboratory and workshop - to carve out an independent path through sheer persistence.
With this persistence and hard work, Yang Bin and his team forged "a few grams of samples" from the laboratory into complete sets of world-leading industrial equipment. Today, even if foreign manufacturers copy the shape of the equipment, they cannot replicate the core processes refined through a thousand temperings. This confidence in independent control was earned by generations of researchers sitting on cold benches and "doing" through decades of repeated trial and error.
From breaking new ground, to following, to keeping pace and then leading - what changes is the iteration of technology and equipment; what never changes is the do-it-yourself gene flowing in their blood. That single word "done" carries the unbending tenacity of generations at the National Engineering Research Center for Vacuum Metallurgy, and it is the spiritual signature they pass from one generation to the next.
