Source: Engineering.com
Borrowing a process used by the aerospace industry – the heat treatment of sheets of advanced high-strength (AHS) steels, the automotive industry is discovering a way to satisfy the recent, growing demand for high-performance alloys while overcoming their tendency to turn brittle and break during the hot stamping and forming process.
High-strength steels are preferred by automakers and parts suppliers as well as those in the aerospace industry because of their enhanced formability and collision resilience compared to conventional steel grades, and metallurgists have been scrambling to develop techniques that will produce tough and reliable components, display high values for yield and tensile strengths, and meet increasingly tough passenger safety, vehicle performance and fuel economy requirements.
Read Kagan Pittman’s article from Engineering.com linked below to learn more about a process developed by Milton Sergio Fernandes de Lima, a researcher at the Brazilian Air Force Command’s Institute for Advanced Studies (IEAv), that consists of heating sheets of 22MnB5steel prior to and after laser welding to achieve bainitic microstructure, an innovative method of high-temperature laser welding for AHS steel appropriate for automotive and aerospace applications.
Read more: “New Laser Welding Technique to Further Enhance Advanced High-Strength Steels”
Read the original release of the study at Agência FAPESP, which provided support to Lima’s work: “Novel Technique Expands Industrial Use of Advanced High-Strength Steel Alloys”.
The study by M.S. F. Lima, D. Gonzáles and S. Liu, “Microstructure and Mechanical Behavior of Induction Assisted Laser Welded AHS Steels”, published by Welding Journal, can be downloaded from s3.amazonaws.com/WJ-www.aws.org/supplement/WJ_2017_10_s376.pdf.
Image: Heat treatment of advanced high-strength steel provides auto and aerospace industry technique for laser welding at high temperatures (image: Welding Journal)
