[월간수소경제 성재경 기자] We covered Elf System, which has been in the fuel cell metal separator business for about 20 years in Changwon. This year, a new factory was opened on the upper part of the mourning clothes, and the ‘direct-acting high-precision servo press’ equipment was newly built.
Elf System is a company specializing in equipment. CEO Jeong Byeong-soo often refers to the general manager (materials, parts, and equipment), but he says that it has been only three or four years that the domestic industry has paid attention to ‘equipment’. As the industry progressed in the form of manufacturing and supplying ‘parts’ according to drawings requested from the outside, there were many cases of being treated poorly as a subcontractor that supplies equipment to parts companies.
Now that perception has changed significantly. Semiconductors, secondary batteries, and fuel cells are commonly included in high value-added industries with high technical difficulty. For mass production, it is essential to establish an automated line made of precision equipment.
This can be seen only by looking at the semiconductor industry. The first place Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong visited on his way to Europe was ASML in the Netherlands, a manufacturer of EUV (extreme ultraviolet) exposure machines. The price of exposure equipment ranges from KRW 150 billion to KRW 300 billion per unit. ASML’s stock price is skyrocketing as it is essential equipment for semiconductor manufacturing.
Kim Hee-yeon, senior researcher at the Korea Energy Research Institute, said the same thing. Dr. Kim developed a technology for coating graphene shells on platinum catalysts for PEM fuel cells with CVD (chemical vapor deposition) equipment, which is mainly used in semiconductor processes.
“The atmosphere has changed a lot compared to the past. Even with CVD alone, the prevailing view was that it was not a commercial equipment but a research equipment for writing a thesis. Now, there are companies that want to use CVD to actually apply it to the production of materials or parts. It is an encouraging change.”
Efforts have been made to reduce the dependence on the ‘small manager’ sector in the wake of Japan’s export restrictions, and now, two years later, it is showing great results.
However, dependence on technologically advanced countries such as Japan and Germany is still high. Even the direct-acting servo press of Elf Systems is dependent on the technology of HSK of Japan.
Interest in materials and parts is expanding into the ‘equipment’ sector. The introduction of new equipment can be seen as a sign of mass production. The boom in the hydrogen industry is judged by how vibrant the fire department industry is. The signal is still ‘yellow light’.
