The new requirements of electric mobility ‘are changing the way to design cars to resist collision’, and hot stamping technology for the manufacture of light sheet metal components with high mechanical performance ‘means that in the event of an accident, there’s no intrusion towards the passengers and the battery’, explained Daniel Casellas the Eurecat technology centre’s scientific director and also professor at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden, at the biannual CHS2 conference held until today in Barcelona.
The leading international event in hot stamping technology, held in the Catalan capital and organised jointly by Eurecat and Luleå University of Technology, has addressed the application of this technology to new materials (new steels and aluminium) and the transfer to other sectors such as the rail sector, as well as the opportunities for the future represented by new processes derived from hot stamping.
At the event, ‘we’ve also seen that the future trend is to create steels with zero carbon footprint, in other words, without using fossil fuels to manufacture them’. This will mean that in the coming years, ‘with these new zero-carbon-footprint steels, together with the low impact and high efficiency of the hot stamping process, it will be possible to build a truly sustainable mentality’, underscores Casellas.
The event has been held for the first time in Barcelona, taking the baton from the series of talks held previously in Kassel, Germany; Luleå, Sweden; Toronto, Canada; and Atlanta, USA, in a context marked by the importance of the advances in the manufacture of high-performance sheet metal components for light vehicle construction and to respond to the challenges of new mobility, as well as with the need to consolidate a sustainable and resilient sector. The opening session featured the Government of Catalonia’s Director General for Knowledge Transfer, Xavier Aldeguer.
The conference included 90 talks by national and international speakers, addressing the challenges and opportunities generated in the processing of new steel and aluminium using hot stamping technologies, innovative solutions to increase process efficiency, advanced characterisation techniques to reduce the development times for new solutions and new numerical simulation methodologies.
The hot stamping of high-strength steel is a mature but constantly evolving technology that enables the manufacture of high-resistance parts with complex geometry, with the possibility of obtaining specific properties in different areas of the part. In recent years, the automotive sector has driven the development of this technology to respond to the demands of environmental and vehicle safety legislation, incorporating the Industry 4.0 concept and extending its use to other materials, such as aluminium and titanium alloys.
