The automotive industry has identified a future generation of Advanced High Strength Steels (AHSS) materials for lightweighting vehicles across all lines, with an availability target of 2017-2025 for integration into vehicle structural designs and production. Click to enlarge.		NanoSteel’s new AHSS sheet designs are the first to arrive inside the automotive industry’s desired material target. NanoSteel’s designs belongs to a new class of cold formable steels with combinations of strength and ductility properties outside known material boundaries. Click to enlarge.

These paradigm changing performance levels are enabled by new discoveries related to the formation of nano-scale microstructures (‘nano-structures’). Previously, sheet steel made of nano-structures was considered too brittle (no elongation) to form the shapes required for automotive parts. In contrast, NanoSteel’s materials are based on newly discovered mechanisms to form nano-structures during production which eliminate the cause of this brittleness.

—Daniel Branagan, Ph.D., CTO and founder of NanoSteel

One of the challenges with currently available AHSS materials is the need to form parts at elevated temperatures—increasing cost and production cycle times. NanoSteel eliminates this extra processing, as the material’s inherent ductility allows the forming of component parts using room temperature metal stamping processes on existing manufacturing equipment, known as cold forming.

The NanoSteel design is an alternative to other light-weighting materials which may cost more, require new investment in parts production and have performance limitations.

We are investing in NanoSteel because of the opportunity associated with their new steel alloy technology. Over the next several years, light-weighting of vehicles will be a major focus area to improve fuel economy. NanoSteel’s nano-structured alloys offer unique material characteristics that are not available today, making them a potential game-changer.

—Jon Lauckner, GM’s chief technology officer, vice president of Global R&D and president of GM Ventures LLC

Over its ten-year history, NanoSteel has created progressive generations of iron-based alloys from surface coatings to monolithic steel. For the oil & gas, mining and power industries, NanoSteel has successfully introduced commercial applications of metallic coatings to prolong service lifetime in the most extreme industrial environments.

For the automotive industry, NanoSteel has achieved a significant breakthrough in the development of nano-structured sheet steel with exceptional strength and ductility.