The Sinuiju Chemical Fibre Factory produces Lyocell with reed as the raw material.

Dr. Kim Jong Bu is a researcher of the Chemical Fibre Institute under the State Academy of Sciences who has completed the technique of producing Lyocell fibre in an industrial way by using reed as the raw material in the country.

It was over 20 years that Kim made a resolve to produce Lyocell with reed as the raw material.

When he, who had been working as the director of the institute, buckled down to the research into Lyocell, his colleagues had doubts about it because he was over 60 and it was a cutting-edge technological task.

He has made many achievements in the research to develop a new artificial fibre. Therefore, no one would reproach him who was well over the pension age, even if he did not take the road of developing a cutting-edge technology.

However, he started the research without hesitation.

It was not the first time that he studied reed fibre.

After graduating from the chemical engineering faculty of the then Pyongyang University of Light Industry in April Juche 52 (1963), he worked as a researcher at the fibre laboratory of an institute. In the course of intensifying the research into reed fibre which he had conducted from his university days, he was convinced once again that larger quantities of staple fibre could be obtained from reed in a hectare of reed field when compared to that from a hectare of cotton field and that it was a very economically-profitable work, given that the country has limited farmland.

He pictured in his mind vast stretches of reed fields transforming into priceless “silk fields.”

After the field inspection of Sindo County in North Phyongan Province, the reed producer in the country, he buckled down to the research into reed fibre.

It was not an easy job for him. The air in his lab was pungent with acrid smell of reagents and his eyes smarted from gas. But he did not give up his work halfway. When water supply was cut off due to pump trouble during experiments, he went down into a 10m-deep well with a rope tied around his waist despite the biting cold in mid-winter.

A year later, “reed silk” began to be produced in the fibre production base.

Kim, who had started the first journey of development in his 20s, chose again the road of scientific research in his twilight years.

He has made devoted efforts for the study of Lyocell. Repeated failure in the research caused vacillation among his colleagues for a while.

One day, officials and scientists in the chemical industry sector gathered together to have a serious discussion on the future of the country’s artificial fibre industry. Some participants insisted on the previous fibre production method with rich experience and industrial foundations, saying that it was premature to introduce Lyocell fibre. Refusing their opinions, Kim Jong Bu said that we should establish at any cost a new Korean-style artificial fibre industry with reed as the raw material.

With this unshakable creed he, together with his colleagues, finally solved the knotty scientific and technological problems arising in dissolution, spinning and after-treatment processes of fibre and completed his research based on an laboratorial method.

He also succeeded in producing a trial product in the process of pilot examination of Lyocell fibre and brought great profits to the country by realizing the industrialization of xylitol with reed.

Kim Jong Bu is a Merited Scientist and a meritorious person of socialist patriotism.