BENTELER presents new high-strength steels for lightweight construction in the automobile industry

Paderborn/Salzburg, June 28, 2017: BENTELER Steel/Tube presents its new high-strength steels for lightweight construction to the automobile industry at the International Conference on Steels in Cars and Trucks (SCT). Dr. Thorsten Andres, Vice President Development at BENTELER Steel/Tube, explains: “Steel plays an essential and important role when it comes to meeting the future demands on the automobile industry. With our two new innovative materials, we are making a major and significant contribution to reducing weight and CO2. And this is confirmed by the first reactions from our customers.”

Rising economic and ecological demands and trends such as e-mobility and self-driving cars are prompting manufacturers in the automotive industry to develop new products with higher demands on semi-finished quality. As a competent supplier of solutions, BENTELER produces tubes using new and innovative materials concepts, in order to do justice to the high future requirements on components. “Steel is one of the materials used in automobile construction, and perhaps even the most important material,” explained Dr. Thorsten Andres, Vice President Development at BENTELER Steel/Tube. High-strength and ultra-high-strength steels are used for this to deliver new designs, the highest level of crash safety and low vehicle weight.

At the SCT, BENTELER Steel/Tube presented two new developments with special characteristics in a lecture entitled ‘New high-performance steels’. “The high-strength, air-hardening steel BAH 120 Plus has the characteristic that even when subjected to heat, as for example in the production of welded constructions, the yield strength remains constant throughout the entire component. That has twin benefits for our customers: We reduce the weight of the component and the customer has one less processing stage, in that he does not have to carry out any additional heat treatment. This results in lower costs,” explains Dr. Jozef Balun, Team Leader Predevelopment Materials Technology, BENTELER Steel/Tube.
The second new development is an ultra-high-strength steel which is based on the new heat-treatment technology of quenching and partitioning. With this heat treatment, the material structure is modified in such a way that enables the BHP 1800 to be easily formed, despite its high strength. “As a result our customers can use these tubes to produce complex components through cold forming, and thereby reduce the weight of the cars and their CO2 emissions,” says Michael Kaufmann, Development Engineer in Predevelopment Materials Technology, BENTELER Steel/Tube.

The 5th International Conference on Steels in Cars and Trucks (SCT) 2017 in Amsterdam, a leading conference in this field, brings together the automobile industry and the steel industry. Over 400 participants from 20 countries took this opportunity between June 18 and 22, 2017 to discuss the research, application and properties of steel in vehicle construction. For BENTELER Steel/Tube participation in this conference is an additional opportunity to network along the entire value-added chain and to forge contacts in industry, research and development.

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