Study and Development of Advanced High Strength Steel to Automotive Industry Applications

Steel is the main material used in the automotive industry, mainly due to its excellent mechanical properties. However, with the development of new materials and technologies in recent decades, there is a demand to improve steel competitiveness to face the market of materials and achieve improvements in quality and performance of cars. In this work it was produced on pilot scale C-Mn-V steels with Cr or Mo addition. The main objective was to evaluate the effects of Cr or Mo addition on microstructure and mechanical properties. These steels were submitted to tensile, bending and hole expansion tests, while microstructure was analyzed using OM and SEM. It could be seen that addition of Cr or Mo resulted in improvements on mechanical properties. However, C-Mn-V steel with Mo performed better, showing excellent behavior in tensile and bending tests, increasing around 30% of mechanical resistance.