HOTFORM

Abstract

HOTFORM is a partnership between academia and industry that seeks to develop new multiphase hot-forming steel grades, ultimately propelling the automobile sector in a new, more efficient direction. A consortium of research and industry partners is developing two new multiphase hot-forming steel grades in a bid to overcome current limitations. The HOTFORM (New Multiphase AHSS Steel Grades for Hot Forming with Improved Formability and Reduced Springback) project began in July 2015, is funded by the EU Research Fund for Coal and Steel (RFCS) and is set to run until the end of 2018. The project is developing a dual-phase (DP) and a complex-phase (CP) steel grade, together with their associated hot-forming processes. This is expected to facilitate the manufacturing of complex-geometry hot-stamped automobile components and enable increasingly lightweight, efficient vehicle design. Researchers are using hot-forming rather than cold-forming techniques to eliminate the drawbacks associated with the latter. These include high resulting springback, high pressing force requirements and the need for several forming operations to achieve complex geometries, as well as significant amount of raw material use for blank-holder areas and large volumes of scrap produced from trimmed areas. The HOTFORM project partners include Tecnalia Research and Innovation, steel manufacturing company Tata Steel in Europe and two car manufacturers: Volkswagen AG and the Fiat Research Centre (CRF-FCA) as end-users of the technology.