New steel beats the strength-ductilitiy trade-off

A Hong Kong-Beijing-Taiwan mechanical engineering team led by Dr Huang Mingxin from the University of Hong Kong (HKU) has recently developed a Super Steel (also called D&P Steel as it adopted a new deformed and partitioned (D&P) strategy) which addressed the strength-ductility trade-off. Its material cost is just one-fifth of that of the steel used in the current aerospace and defence applications. This research breakthrough is recently published in the academic journal Science.

Steel has been the most widely used metal in the history of humankind and can be produced with much higher efficiency than any other metallic materials. A strong and ductile steel has been sought since the beginning of Iron Age. It is very difficult to further improve the ductility of metallic materials when their yield strength is beyond 2 Gigapascal (GPa). A breakthrough steel -- the Super Steel -- which has been developed by an HKU-led HK-Beijing-Taiwan team, achieves a high ductility, above the yield strength of 2 GPa.

In addition to the substantial improvement of tensile properties, this breakthrough steel has achieved the unprecedented yield strength of 2.2 GPa and uniform elongation of 16%. Additionally, this breakthrough steel has two advantages:

1. Low raw-materials cost

   The raw materials cost of the D&P steel is only 20% of the maraging steel used in aerospace and defence applications. The chemical composition of this breakthrough steel belongs to the system of medium manganese (Mn) steel, containing 10% manganese, 0.47% carbon, 2% aluminium, 0.7% vanadium (mass percent), and the balance is iron. No expensive alloying elements have been used exhaustively but just some common alloying compositions that can be widely seen in the commercialized steels.

2. Simple industrial processing

   The second advantage is that this breakthrough steel can be developed using conventional industrial processing routes, including warm rolling, cold rolling and annealing. This is different from the development of other metallic materials where the fabrication processes involve complex routes and special equipment, which are difficult to scale-up. Therefore, it is expected that the present breakthrough steel has a great potential for industrial mass production.

Compared with the widely used automotive steels as well as the steel used in aerospace and defence (maraging steel), the D&P steel demonstrated a much higher yield strength but maintaining a much better ductility (uniform elongation). The D&P steel also outperformed the nanotwinned (NT) steel which was also developed by the same HKU research team led by Dr. Huang Mingxin in 2015. Additionally, the developed D&P steel demonstrated the best combination of yield strength and uniform elongation among all existing high-strength metallic materials. In particular, the uniform elongation of the developed D&P steel is much higher than that of metallic materials with yield strength beyond 2.0 GPa.

The development of this breakthrough steel is a successful example of collaboration of young scientists from Hong Kong, Beijing and Taiwan. This collaboration is led by Dr Huang Mingxin's group from the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Hong Kong (HKU). Dr Huang Mingxin's group has been dedicated to study the deformation mechanism of ultra-high strength metallic materials. In this research, Dr Huang's group firstly proposed a new deformation mechanism that the high dislocation density can improve both strength and ductility simultaneously. It is worth mentioning that a general belief in textbooks is that increasing dislocation density will elevate the strength but undesirably deteriorate the ductility. Dr Luo Haiwen's group from University of Science and Technology Beijing is specialized in steel processing and has successfully introduced high mobile dislocation density in this breakthrough steel. Dr Yen Hung-wei's group from National Taiwan University supported this new deformation mechanism by performing the advanced microstructure characterization.