New Sustainable Safe Steel for Automotive Components

ongoing

In the current climate emergency and energy crisis, the need to reduce energy and raw material consumption is undoubtedly imperative in the context of a more environmentally and resource-conscious society. Bearing in mind that steel is the most produced metallic material in the world, 1900 million tonnes per year, it is not surprising that a large number of scientific and technological resources are devoted to simplifying its compositions, improving its properties, and optimizing the necessary processing. In line with this, in this proposal, New Sustainable Steel For Automotive Components NES3ACOM, we have found a niche of study and development in which we intend to develop a new steel, belonging to the Medium Manganese Steels (MMS) family, which can be used to manufacture two security components for the automotive industry, one for anti-intrusion and the other for energy absorption, by means of two types of specific processing, more energy efficient than those currently used. While in the case of Anti-Intrusion, a homogeneity in the chemical composition of the different microstructural phases is pursued, in the case of Energy Absorbing the heterogeneity of these compositions will be exploited, which is a product of the steel manufacturing process and therefore innate to it. In the framework of the NES3ACOM project, during the design process of this alloy, a plethora of processing parameters, solid-state phase transformation theories of steels, microstructure-processing relationships, properties-microstructure, etc. will have to be combined and taken into account in order to obtain, after processing the steel, the optimum microstructures whose properties equal or improve those required for the two applications at a lower environmental cost than at present.