E-Cigarette Supply Chain Process Introduction (1)

* Smoking is harmful to health, minors are prohibited from using e-cigarettes, non-smokers are not recommended to use e-cigarettes

As an electronic product, electronic cigarettes involve a huge and complicated industrial division of labor, but after combing through this article, I believe you can also clearly perceive the structural distribution of this industry in your mind. This paper mainly reviews the industry distribution of upstream supply chain.

First, e-cigarette structure overview

Before sorting out the distribution of the e-cigarette supply chain, we may wish to take a look at what the e-cigarette structure looks like.
There are many kinds of electronic cigarettes, disposable, change-type, open, large smoke, etc., but no matter what kind of electronic cigarettes, they are inseparable from three major components: atomization components, electronic components, and structural components.

● Atomizing components: mainly atomizing core, oil storage cotton, etc., play the role of atomizing fume and storage fume;
● Electronic components: including battery, microphone, solution board, etc., to provide power, control power, temperature, automatic switch and other functions;
● Structural components: mainly shell, but also including thimble connector, battery bracket, sealing silicone, filter and so on.

In the supply chain of electronic cigarettes, in addition to the three major suppliers, there are important components such as equipment and supporting services, which are expanded below.

Second, atomizing components
Atomizing components are mainly all kinds of atomizing core (ceramic core, cotton core), heating wire, oil guide cotton, oil storage cotton and so on.

1. Atomizing core
Among them, the atomization core is composed of heating metal + oil guide material. Because the current Electronic Cigarette is mainly based on resistance heating, it is inseparable from heating metals such as iron chromium, nickel chromium, titanium, 316L stainless steel, palladium silver, tungsten alloy, etc., which can be made into heating wire, porous mesh, thick film printed metal film, PVD coating and other forms.

At the microscopic level, the fume oil is heated on the heating metal, and then from liquid to gas, and the macro performance is the process of atomization.

In practical applications, the heating metal is often matched with oil guiding materials, such as oil guiding cotton, porous ceramic matrix, etc., through winding, embedding, tile and other ways to combine, so that the design is to drain a small amount of soot to the heating metal through the oil guiding material, so as to facilitate the rapid atomization of soot.
In terms of types, the atomization core has two categories of cotton core and ceramic core, the cotton core has heating wire wrapped cotton, etched mesh cotton, etc., and the ceramic core is buried.

2. Oil storage cotton
Oil storage cotton, as the name suggests, plays the role of storage of tobacco oil, its application greatly improves the use experience of Disposable Electronic Cigarettes, focuses on solving the serious problem of early Disposable Electronic cigarettes oil leakage, and greatly improves the number of mouths.
Oil storage cotton follows the rise of the Disposable Electronic Cigarette market, but it does not stop at oil storage, and it also has a lot of market space in the application of filters.
In terms of process, oil storage cotton is generally prepared by extrusion fiber, hot melt and other processes, in the material, common PP, PET fiber, individual high temperature requirements, will use PA fiber, and even PI.