High Manganese Steel Production Fundamentals

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Steel producers must as never before supply car and light truck makers with better high strength steels. Recent regulations impose demanding vehicle greenhouse gas emissions and passenger safety goals. New classes of advanced high strength steels (AHSS) under development promise to help automotive designers meet these specifications but are based on alloy concepts substantially different from currently made steels. Alloy manganese levels of five to 22 percent are contemplated vs. current two percent. These create complex issues for raw steel production through casting, and there is little fundamental information to guide industrial process engineers to resolve them. This proposal addresses basic questions around AHSS grade production, developed with four industrial supporters who will provide validation data, with five specific aims: (1) Define high-yield manganese alloying strategies, (2)Explore the potential for the CRISP steelmaking reactor, developed by Hatch Ltd., to produce high manganese steels. (3)Assess AOD refining efficiency for high Mn steels, (4) Model ladle refining kinetics for high manganese steels, including changing slag/metal/inclusion compositions and desulphurization, and assess basic scientific issues related to inclusion formation and removal. (5)Define safe operating windows for continuous casting high-Mn steels based on measurements of their solidification and hot brittleness characteristics. These basic process metallurgy issues are critical to future Canadian steel and automotive manufacturing, which together generate over $100 billion in business and employ 135,000 persons, and pertain to NSERC SGP target area 3 - Manufacturing - specifically commercialization of new structural materials and process modeling to enable this.