CrazyNeutrino said:
Revolutionary steel treatment paves the way for radically lighter, stronger, cheaper cars
Back in 2011, we wrote about a fascinating new way to heat-treat regular, cheap steel to endow it with an almost miraculous blend of characteristics. Radically cheaper, quicker and less energy-intensive to produce, Flash Bainite is stronger than titanium by weight, and ductile enough to be pressed into shape while cold without thinning or cracking. It’s now being tested by three of the world’s five largest car manufacturers, who are finding they can produce thinner structural car components that are between 30-50 percent lighter and cheaper than the steel they’ve been using, while maintaining the same performance is crash tests. Those are revolutionary numbers in the auto space.
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My response here is stuck between “I don’t believe it”, “Amazing” and “I knew about it all along”. :-(
I did once hear about a revolutionary new steel developed at Monash University. The normal problem with steel is that if you make it stronger it becomes more brittle and if you make it more ductile then it becomes softer. It’s been known for yonks that this isn’t an essential property of steel because the steel produced by welds is both stronger and more ductile than the base metal. About 5 years ago, Monash University Materials Science section developed a heat treatment of steel that produced micro-crystals, much smaller than normal, and this gave a unique combination of hardness and ductility. They were looking at using it as a surface coating for more normal steels, as a replacement for other hard-coating methods.