Eurecat leads three European projects to optimise steel components and decarbonise their manufacturing process

The Eurecat technology centre is leading three European projects with a total budget of €6.9 million which optimise a range of steel qualities to improve its properties and uses in the automotive, aeronautics and other sectors while seeking to reduce defects, manufacturing costs and carbon dioxide emissions during manufacture to further decarbonise industry.

The initiatives are on display this week at the Steel Tech 2023 fair, Southern Europe’s flagship event for the steel industry which brings together the major players in the value chain and is taking place in Bilbao from 25-27 October.

Specifically, Eurecat is coordinating the COOPHS European consortium which is working to improve production of steel with low CO₂ emissions for the automotive industry by developing more sustainable manufacturing processes which will help towards its decarbonisation. 

“Producing high-performance steel through recycling will make it possible to minimise CO₂ emissions from the automotive industry while also making the European steel market more sustainable and competitive in line with the goals of the Research Fund for Coal and Steel (RFCS) and the European Green Deal,” says Jaume Pujante, the project’s coordinator and head of the New Processes for Advanced Materials Line in Eurecat’s Metallic and Ceramic Materials Unit.

The project involves seven European organisations including stakeholders from the steel industry and the automotive safety sector and has a budget of almost €1.9 million. It targets assessing more environmentally friendly production of press-hardened steels (PHS), a light and strong structural material essential in today’s automotive safety components. In particular, the implications of implementing electric arc furnaces (EAF) to replace blast furnaces as the main production pathway will be studied throughout the project.

Eurecat is also leading the Sup3rForm European project which will work on optimising third-generation quenching and partitioning (Q&P) steels and medium-manganese steels to enhance their properties and foster their use in lightweight structural applications which meet the need for lighter, more efficient, safer and more cost-effective vehicles in the mobility of the future. 

Sup3rForm, which has a budget of €2.4 million, will implement multi-scale modelling and material testing techniques to identify the main damage and deformation mechanisms of these new generation advanced steels designed to offer high strength and also to understand the relationship between their microstructures and critical in-use properties such as formability, fracture toughness, fatigue and crashworthiness.

Hence the Sup3rForm project “will demonstrate the industrial viability of Q&P and medium-Mn steels for manufacturing high added-value automotive parts at low cost and with a smaller carbon footprint over the vehicle’s lifecycle,” says David Frómeta, the project’s coordinator and head of the Mechanical Behaviour Line in Eurecat’s Metallic and Ceramic Materials Unit.

The Sup3rForm consortium consists of eight European partners covering the entire automotive industry value chain and R&D.

Eurecat is also coordinating the SuPreAM European consortium which is to develop new predictive and optimisation models for surface finishing operations to drive additive manufacturing in the industrial steel sector and reduce defects and manufacturing costs which will also help to minimise scrap. 

The project’s predictive modelling of finishing operations will factor in the influence of additive manufacturing technology and steel grades together with machining strategies and process parameters plus the surface properties of components made by additive manufacturing, enabling the identification of the main variables affecting surface integrity.

The SuPreAM project is built on integrating “all the aspects affecting the surface integrity of additively manufactured parts in order to deliver machining solutions and strategies at the upstream design and finishing stage of the part while also avoiding scrap generation with a view to producing defect-free components,” says Montse Vilaseca, the project’s coordinator and director of the Metallic and Ceramic Materials Unit at Eurecat.

The consortium for the project, which has a €2.6 million budget, includes steel production and machining businesses and three research institutes.

All three projects coordinated by Eurecat are financed by the Research Fund for Coal and Steel (RFCS).