Design and development of precipitate strengthened advanced high strength steel for automotive application

Stringent safety and pollution control norms forces the car industry to use higher strength steels in different components of an automobile. However, high strength steels typically possess less formability which makes forming operations difficult. Thus developing high strength steel, with better formability for automotive application, is a challenge for all the steel companies those are working to solve in different ways. In the present work, a new approach, from designing of steel composition to finalizing the process parameters, to develop high strength steel (minimum 1000 MPa UTS) with high elongation (minimum 15%) will be discussed in details. High elongation of this steel is expected to make the forming operation easier without compromising with the strength. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.