The Future is Forming

The Tool and Die Authority February 2010 Newsletter contained these articles:

Marketing Makes a Difference for Manufacturers — Part 2: Joe Brown
Tool Damage Caused by Sharpening: Peter Ulintz
Can Robotics Help a Tool and Die Shop? Part 2: Bob Quinn
Preventing Nuisance Faults, Part 2: Drew Stevens


and from Danny Schaeffler of Engineering Quality Solutions (EQS)...
What is Steel? … Part 4: Dual Phase Steels (or, The Shape of Things to Come)

Since the early to mid 1990s, dual phase steels have been available in Europe and Japan, and have been used in their bill of materials for vehicle production. Concurrent with the wider adoption of this family of higher strength steels, the overseas divisions of auto OEMs were forging closer ties with their US counterparts, and OEMs were pushing for common grades available worldwide. At the same time, fuel economy standards were getting more challenging to meet, and crash/rollover requirements were being raised. About 10 years ago, as a result of this perfect storm, domestic car companies pushed the North American steelmakers to develop and commercialize dual phase steels.




“Dual Phase” describes the steel microstructure – these grades have two phases: islands of hard martensite within a matrix of soft ferrite. As the martensite content increases, so does the strength. The most common dual phase steel grade has a minimum yield strength of 350MPa and a minimum tensile strength of 600MPa. In this alloy, there is about 10% martensite in the microstructure, with the remainder comprised of ferrite.

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Labels: Advanced High Strength Steels, AHSS, blog, Dual Phase, EQS, Steel

Posted by Engineering Quality Solutions on Saturday, May 01, 2010 at 12:03 PM | Permalink |