EUROPEAN STEEL TECHNOLOGY AND APPLICATION DAYS 2017 - ESTAD 2017

The many new steels being developed to address the light-weighting car initiative put new demands on the thermal processing equipment in order to obtain the desired mechanical properties. Higher annealing temperatures, faster cooling rates, tighter control of the cooling curve, better strip shape and more uniform tempering are needed. Interestingly, many of these demanding requirements are already addressed on smaller scale continuous harden and temper lines. Now concepts have been developed to increase the width of the strip to 300% over the average harden and temper line and to increase the throughput to 2000% and more over the same. This results in production capability suitable for many applications required by the automotive manufactures and their tier 1 suppliers.