Chinese scientists make breakthrough in ultra-high-strength steel technology

Chinese scientists said they have developed a super steel that has high levels of strength and ductility. This breakthrough can have a wide variety of industrial applications.

In addition, the cost of the new material is only one-fifth of the cost of steel used in modern aerospace and defense applications, according to the journal US Science.

Strength and ductility are desirable properties of metallic materials for a wide range of applications, but increasing strength often leads to a decrease in ductility, which is known as a trade-off between strength and ductility.
A Hong Kong-Beijing-Taiwan team led by Huang Mingxing of the University of Hong Kong has developed a new manufacturing technology called deformed and divided (D&P) to address this problem.

“Steel is the most widely used metal material in human history and can be manufactured with much greater efficiency than any other metal material,” the team said in a statement.

"Therefore, the creation of strong and ductile steel was achieved as a result of a long search since the beginning of the Iron Age in the history of mankind."

The team explained that it is very difficult to improve the ductility of metallic materials when their yield strength exceeds 2 GPa.

They have now made “a successful attempt at realizing that dream” as a newly developed method produces a “breakthrough steel” that has an “unprecedented” yield of 2.2 GPa and a uniform elongation of 16%.
“The D&P steel developed showed the best combination of yield strength and uniform elongation of any high-strength metal material available,” the researchers say.

"In particular, the uniform elongation of the developed D&P steel is much higher than that of metallic materials with a yield strength above 2.0 GPa."