Starting with Customer Needs: How Miao Renliang Develops New Contact Tip Materials at Fudar

Miao Renliang at Work

"Before we decide what to develop, we need to understand how the contact material will be used and what problem the customer is trying to solve," Miao Renliang says. For him, that means turning the customer's performance goals into technical requirements for the contact material and the process used to make it.

First lesson on the production floor

Miao Renliang's degree had given him a foundation in materials science, but electrical contact materials were new to him. Soon after joining Fudar, he was assigned to the production floor for hands-on training. The workshop showed him how different materials were processed. "If you don't understand what happens on the production floor, your ideas for improving a process may be impractical," he says.

Leading his first R&D project

During his first two years at Fudar, Miao Renliang learned to tackle unfamiliar problems by examining production data, seeking advice and testing possible solutions. Each challenge helped him develop the judgment he would need to lead an R&D project of his own.

After two years, Miao Renliang took charge of his first R&D project: developing a multicomponent silver metal oxide material for contact tips. The customer manufactured grid-connection contactors used in wind power systems, but its existing AgCdO and AgSnO2In2O3 contact materials fell short of the required electrical life. A replacement also had to meet a short-time withstand requirement. Fudar needed a material that met both performance requirements and could be produced consistently at scale.

Fudar’s Silver Contact Tips

Until then, Miao Renliang had mostly carried out tasks assigned by senior colleagues. As project leader, he had to make his own technical judgments, stay in regular contact with the customer, and take responsibility for the result. "I worried about whether I could complete the project and whether the material would pass the customer's tests," he recalls. "If I had let that fear stop me, I would never have known whether I could do it." Working with production and quality colleagues, he followed trials on the production floor, analyzed the results, and adjusted the process repeatedly.

After several months, the samples passed the customer's initial tests. But when the team used the same process for small-batch production, the contacts showed surface blackening, and internal oxidation did not proceed as intended. A process that had worked for samples could not yet produce an acceptable batch.

Possible solutions existed in theory. The challenge was to turn one into a practical process that could be repeated in production. Miao Renliang and his team focused on the heat treatment and internal oxidation steps, using orthogonal experiments to identify the optimal process parameters. Scaling up also exposed differences between the new material's expansion behavior and the original design, so the team worked with manufacturing colleagues to adapt the tooling.

From the initial request to batch production, the project took about seven to eight months. The new material passed customer validation and entered production, with annual output of approximately three to five metric tons at the time. It gave the customer a domestically developed alternative for its wind power contactors. The new material helped the customer gain market share in that segment and brought Fudar further orders. The project was also rated "internationally advanced" in a provincial industrial new product evaluation.

For Miao Renliang, leading the project required a new level of initiative and personal responsibility. Working through challenges with colleagues across departments strengthened his communication and coordination skills—and taught him what it takes to turn a successful sample into a material ready for production.

What Gives R&D Its Purpose?

For Miao Renliang, R&D must be driven by customer needs. Customers focus on end-use performance, market competitiveness, and reliability. R&D engineers translate those priorities into technical requirements for material composition, process parameters, and performance targets, keeping development focused on solving real problems and delivering practical value.

Miao Renliang

As Miao Renliang moved from hands-on engineering to managing the Materials Technology Section, his focus expanded from developing his own expertise to helping his team develop theirs. His commitment to meeting customer needs remained unchanged. Early in his career, he accompanied his mentor to customer meetings, mostly listening and taking notes. Today, he discusses requirements directly with customers and presents technical proposals suited to their applications.

The team's next challenges

Miao Renliang and his team are now developing advanced contact tip materials for advanced applications, including silver tin oxide contacts for AC contactors. They aim to match the performance of leading products in the industry. As silver prices have risen in recent years, customers have increasingly sought ways to reduce costs. In response, the team is developing materials with lower silver content and exploring potential substitutes for silver.

Asked what advice he would give engineers just joining Fudar, Miao Renliang returns to the approach that shaped his own career: spend time on the production floor, learn the processes firsthand and build experience. When a problem arises, take the time to understand it fully. "If they do those things, I believe the results will come with time," he says.

His journey reflects Fudar's expertise in electrical contact materials: understanding the customer's needs, developing a suitable material and refining the process until it can be produced reliably in batches.