Anthraquinones are mostly used in dyes, but the amount used as a digestion aid for pulping has been increasing rapidly.

(1) For the production of dyes, anthraquinone is used as raw material. After sulfonation, chlorination, nitration, etc., a wide range of dye intermediates can be obtained for the production of anthraquinone-based disperse dyes, acid dyes, vat dyes, reaction Dyes, etc., form a dye category with complete chromatography and good performance. According to statistics, there are more than 400 varieties of anthraquinone dyes, which occupy a very important position in the field of synthetic dyes.

(2) Used as a pulping cooking agent for papermaking It is only necessary to add a small amount of anthraquinone to the alkaline cooking liquid to speed up the delignification, shorten the cooking time, improve the pulp yield and reduce the waste liquid load. There are more and more paper mills using anthraquinone additives. The consumption of anthraquinones as cooking additives is growing rapidly.

(3) Anthraquinone has other application fields: It can be used for the production of high-concentration hydrogen peroxide; in the fertilizer industry, it is used to make sodium anthraquinone disulfonate, a desulfurizer. It can be used as vegetable oil isomerization catalyst and accelerator in nickel electroplating. Pesticides are used in grain dressing to prevent birds, especially crows, from eating the seeds. Preparations are available as powders. It is used as dye discharge auxiliaries in the printing and dyeing industry.