Slashdot Mirror
Steel Treatment Paves the Way For Radically Lighter, Stronger, Cheaper Cars (gizmag.com)
Zothecula writes: Radically cheaper, quicker and less energy-intensive to produce than regular steel, Flash Bainite is stronger than titanium by weight, and ductile enough to be pressed into shape while cold without thinning or cracking. It's now being tested by three of the world's five largest car manufacturers, who are finding they can produce thinner structural car components that are between 30-50 percent lighter and cheaper than the steel they've been using, while maintaining the same performance is crash tests. Grain of salt: the positive claims here are mostly coming from the company responsible for the process.
Probably. But the US ARMAMENT RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT AND ENGINEERING CENTER did an evaluation of the process and gave it positive -- but not perfect -- marks in 2011.
http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I did some graduate work with this company (I'm a Welding Engineer) and it is indeed interesting, but I realllllly wish they would stop calling it Flash Bainite. There is 0% bainite structure in the material, it can only form with slower heating/cooling rates. Call it "flashite" or something else. The problem with the material is as soon as you heat the material back up you lose all of the bonus properties. Right now all of the panels/pieces that automotive would look to replace with this have lots of spot/mig welds on them, so those areas would be much weaker after the fastening work was done.
Problem with that is you don't gain the benefit of collisions that are probably less dangerous (less kinetic energy is required for movement) and no fuel savings (again, less kinetic energy.)
No, actually, they're saying it's not good to blindly strengthen a vehicle throughout, as that prevents the existing crash structures from working as engineered.
Maintaining the same strength of design is far more important to crash safety with the newer approach of 'ablative' vehicles that purposefully self-shred to dissipate energy, so this new metal will by definition result in lighter cars with thinner material layers in the first iteration or two.
And honestly that's thrilling to me: This means we could very well see cars as light as those from the 80's; at first we'll see SUVs and full-sized vehicles able to lose hundreds of pounds and gain some gas mileage to the point the manufacturers will be forced to re-design things further down the chain until sub-2000-pound vehicles happen regularly again at the cheap end.
- WolfWings, too lazy to login to /. in way too many years.
You're right of course, but the concern is over the methane they produce, not carbon dioxide. methane is hundreds of times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Making metal parts extremely corrosion resistant is pretty easy, most manufacturers simply choose to go the cheap way to decrease sales prices and increase profits. While I am sure some manufactures would like for their vehicles to fail more quickly to increase their sales due to what has become known as "planned obsolescence". However hopefully they fear the fallout if their vehicles deteriorate too quickly, I think there was a well known instance in the UK where a manufacturer (Lancia I believe) built a car out of cheap metal that rusted quickly and were forced to buy back many of the cars they sold and their loss of reputation in the UK eventually forced them out of that market.