With OEMs employing mixed-material strategies in the production of their vehicles, steel no longer enjoys the same security it once did in the automotive industry. The material still has distinct advantages: it’s stronger, cheaper, and critically, it’s familiar – the infrastructure built around steel is the product of more than a century’s work. The challenge lies in being able to provide these benefits whilst simultaneously meeting demand for lightweighting solutions.
NanoSteel is one company dedicated to meeting this challenge. The Providence, Rhode Island-headquartered nano-structured steel material design company has created a grade of advanced high strength steel (AHSS) which it claims can provide 87% of an aluminium body-in-white’s weight savings at a far lower cost. In a recent conversation with Megatrends, David Paratore, Chief Executive, began by explaining how NanoSteel’s setup allows it to operate on the bleeding edge of steel technology.
What makes NanoSteel different from steel giants like ArcelorMittal, or Tata?
We’re an advanced materials company that designs iron-based alloys. Unlike traditional steel mills, we do not produce steel for commercial sale. Our sole focus is on the development of steel alloys that meet customer-defined requirements, and can be produced using existing manufacturing techniques and equipment. As such, we’re able to focus on advancing the state of the art for steels.
Without mills, how are your products produced?
We are partnered with qualified automotive steel producers who can manufacture and supply our AHSS products to OEMs and Tier 1s. By partnering, we can combine our expertise in designing new alloys with our partners’ expertise in process technology and efficient production, their investments in plant capital and their existing links with the supply chain serving the automotive industry.
How do you go about establishing these partnerships?
We want to develop partnerships with steel producers within each major global region to remain competitive for our automotive customers, while ensuring our steel partners see reasonable levels of demand. Partnerships are made possible through license agreements that allow our steel partners to produce our grades for sale to the automotive customers. In addition, we license OEMs and Tier 1s to utilise the steel produced by our partners.
What can you offer OEMs that’s new?
Our development approach is different from other automotive sheet steel products in that it makes use of nanotechnology. This does not mean we create tiny nano-sized steels, but rather steels with microstructures at the nanoscale. When examined under a microscope, all steels are comprised of crystals and in the steels that we design, those crystals form on the scale of nanometres. These nanostructures are important because they offer very high strength as well as high formability. This unique combination of performance properties along with the ability to achieve these capabilities using inexpensive ingredients and standard existing production equipment is ultimately our unique technology.
What challenges will NanoSteel face as lightweighting becomes more and more important, and more materials enter the market?
The largest challenge NanoSteel will face is a general aversion to trying something new. It’s easy to default back to what is known, and carries the lowest risk possible to those accountable for decisions. However, as lightweighting initiatives force change in the automotive industry and material choices become increasingly part of the solution, our ability to offer a product that can be shaped, welded and repaired in a similar way to other sheet steels is a valuable advantage.
In this way, we’re fortunate to sometimes be viewed as “just another steel” given the industry’s success with ferrous materials. When other options are explored, such as aluminium or carbon fibre, the level of investigation has to go much deeper given the number of changes needed in both the supply chain and production. OEMs would need to consider everything from how much the material costs, to how it’s produced, shaped into parts, joined to other materials and inspected.
So when it comes to NanoSteel’s automotive sheet, we anticipate the product will be perceived in two ways. On the one hand, we bring a new and truly advanced material technology to the market, but on the other hand, we are something familiar, something comfortable.
What demands do you expect from the automotive industry over the next ten years?
We believe that the need for automotive structural lightweighting will only get greater given both accelerating fuel economy standards and the additional weight associated with new features consumers will require in their vehicles. Lightweighting is certainly not a new phenomenon – Henry Ford himself has been quoted multiple times about the need to eliminate excess weight in a vehicle, but the fact is that the pressures to cut weight have never been higher and will only get more intense as we get closer to 2025.
Another trend in the automotive industry is the evolution from regional to global platforms requiring the availability of the same steel grades in multiple geographies. To support this trend, NanoSteel will license its proprietary technology to both automotive OEMs for use in their automotive designs globally, and to the regional steel producers to assure the product is available worldwide.
How will your relationship with OEMs evolve over that time frame?
Over the next ten years, our relationships with the automotive OEMs will deepen as we move through the stages of new material qualification, and introduce additional products. Currently we are in the manufacturing optimisation process. The materials produced at the lab scale can achieve the desired properties, and now we are working with our partners on scaling up to production equipment.
Upon completion of this phase, our materials will be released to automakers for validation and qualification, where we will assist them in their testing programmes. Afterwards, we will work with the automotive engineers and designers to create parts that take advantage of our material capabilities. Once we reach this stage, we will also be working with OEMs on developing the parameters for the next sets of alloys to come out of NanoSteel, and then we take those new materials through that same process.
What will be important for NanoSteel moving forward?
Once production coils are available, our largest priority will be working with OEMs across the globe to identify early applications for our automotive sheet steel. As part of this process, our engineering team will work with structural designers at OEMs and Tier 1s to identify opportunities where our steels can improve upon existing solutions and reduce weight.
