Japan, PROTEUS Project succeeds the Development of Super Strength Steel

Japanese industry-government-academia project, Production Technologies for Environmental-Conscious Ultrafine-Grained Steel (PROTEUS), succeeded the development for the production fundamental technology of 650 mega paschal class Super Shortinterval Multi-pass Rolling which has 1 micron grain size. Manabu Kinouchi, project leader explained the achievement of the project to Japan Metal Bulletin.He said the project was advanced for five years for fiscal 2002 at the ended of March 2003-fiscal 2006. He said that PROTEUS aimed the development of the environmental type steel products and has been developed the production fundamental technology. He said the team minimized the grain size of low carbon steel to 1 micron meter diameter without utilization of rare material considering with recycle and increased the strength of steel products by twice.He explains that the team succeeded the production of 650 mega paschal class hot rolled steel sheet with 2 millimeter thick and 300 millimeter width stably in the world. If the sheet is used as structure steel of automobile, the volume of used steel products would be reduced by about 20% because the steel sheet strength increases by minimum about 50% compared with common steel sheet. He said the amount of passenger automobile which has at 1,200-1,600 kilogram would decrease by 20% or about 80 kilogram from 400 kilogram of car structure thanks to using new steel sheet.He said the technology can be used to steel plate production for shipbuilding or bridge, steel plate is expected to increase strength property such as resistance to fatigue because 1 micron super fine-grained particle on surface part by rolling with high speed and high pressure. He expects the technology gives corrosion resistance and weather resistance to steel plate and some achievements would be announced by steel maker within a few years.He expects that Japanese steel maker had been kept top technology in the world, and new technology developed by PROTEUS would overseas maker and can be measure to keep innovation lead the world in steel industry.