Weight-reduced seat track thanks to high-strength steel strip grade (header graphic)

HIGH-STRENGTH STEEL STRIP

Sustainable with lightweight design – high-strength materials from Waelzholz enable the cost-effective production of safety-relevant vehicle components such as seat tracks with a weight savings of up to 50 percent and excellent formability at the same time.

The demands placed on high-quality and sustainable steel materials used to manufacture high-performance components for modern vehicles are becoming increasingly complex. Particularly in view of ongoing climate change, lightweight design concepts in the automotive industry play a key role in combating rising carbon emissions. In this context, the aim is to reduce the weight of the vehicles without having to compromise on safety-relevant features.

Since weight has a significant impact on a vehicle’s fuel or power consumption, systematically reducing vehicle weight leads to measurable benefits from both a financial and an environmental point of view. For the end consumer, it means increased efficiency and thus lower carbon emissions. The consumption advantage is also financially relevant in this context. After all, using less fuel or electricity directly translates into lower operating costs.

In order to successfully implement lightweight design concepts, modern automotive manufacturing increasingly requires high-strength steel materials. The challenge in this context is that the material must exhibit both high strength and excellent formability in order to be able to achieve tight bending radii. Waelzholz meets these at times conflicting requirements with rigorous development work in the field of materials engineering. We have decades of expertise in the high-performance steel materials segment and offer RAWAEL®, a micro-alloyed high-strength material with a tensile strength of up to 1,000 MPa. This material delivers the required design stability and crash performance of safety-relevant components, such as those needed for seat tracks, while at the same time offering a weight advantage of up to 50 percent compared to standard materials.

INDUSTRY

automotive

APPLICATION

seat components

STEEL MATERIAL

high-strength steel strip

Weight-reduced seat track made of high-strength steel strip grade (rendered graphic)

1  Top track
2  Bottom track

Up to 50 percent weight savings with high-strength steel strip materials from Waelzholz – thanks to their excellent formability, micro-alloyed fine-grain steels such as RAWAEL® are ideal for the cost-effective production of extremely lightweight vehicle components such as seat tracks with maximum strength.

  • Patented high-strength material RAWAEL® achieves tensile strengths of over 1,000 MPa
  • Ultrafine, monophasic microstructures enable reliably reproducible and even complex forming processes within the tightest tolerances
  • Weight savings of up to 50 percent without any trade-offs, even for safety-relevant components
  • Constant tensile and yield strengths over the entire length of the strip

Taking sustainability a step further – by providing the best properties for our customers’ cold forming processes.

In order to ensure that our customers can implement complex shapes, we focus precisely on the parameters of their manufacturing processes.

The Waelzholz special grade RAWAEL® combines high strength with the excellent processing properties of a micro-alloyed fine-grain steel. The special combination of rolling operations and heat treatment produces a highly formable monophasic microstructure which supports the complex forming operations required to produce the seat track components with exact radii within very tight tolerances.

Due to the high homogeneity of the material, our RAWAEL® steel strip also offers tremendously high dimensional tolerance. The uniformity of the mechanical characteristics as well as the material thickness over the entire length of the steel strip as well as over multiple batches ensures that each individual seat track has reliably constant properties at each measuring point. This consistency in the characteristic values of our high-strength materials often exceeds the levels required by the standard. The advantage for our customers’ manufacturing process is that thanks to the constant material properties, less readjustment is required, eliminating time-consuming and costly setup times. This is why an uncompromisingly high degree of reproducibility also plays a critical role in the development of an economically sustainable material solution.

CONTACT PARTNERS

Frank Kluwe
Sales Automotive
Frank Kluwe
Tel.
Fax
+49 2331 964-2248
+49 2331 964-1300 2248
Jens Müller
Materials Technology
Jens Müller
Tel.
+49 2331 964 2487

Successful together – use our materials expertise for your next challenge

We conduct a detailed materials consultation to provide you with comprehensive support in the implementation of your projects, from giving you greater freedom in your design process to optimizing your manufacturing processes and ensuring compliance with the highest standards of quality.

Simply use the form below to take the first step toward receiving rapid and effective support.

* Required fields

Privacy Policy*

Thin stainless precision steel strip for high-performance fuel cells

Our stainless high-grade steel is the material of choice for the implementation of complex flow fields as well as compact designs in the manufacture of bipolar plates for hydrogen-based fuel cells. / more 

Thin electrical steel strip for high-efficiency electric motors

NO grades from Waelzholz with low core losses and customized coating systems for high-performance rotor and stator components. / more 

| Steel materials A union of opposites

Waelzholz’s PT-strip and RAWAEL® materials stand out for their combination of high tensile strength and excellent… / more

| Steel materials The variety of Waelzholz high-strength materials

Waelzholz materials from the “high-strength” category offer tremendous potential for various applications thanks to… / more

| Industries & applications Efficient electric vehicles with thin electrical steel strip grades

Waelzholz’s extremely thin NO 20 – NO 30 electrical steel strip grades are the ideal material to use in electric motors. / more

| Steel materials Fast-bonding varnish: accelerating the electrical steel strip plate stamping and bonding process

The new fast-bonding varnish accelerates the process of bonding electrical steel strip plates into lamination stacks… / more

| Industries & applications Materials for high-performance bipolar plates in fuel cells

Thanks to its exceptional stability and formability, stainless precision steel strip from Waelzholz is ideally suited… / more

| Sustainability First CO2-reduced coils delivered

The first CO2-reduced hot rolled steel strip coils manufactured by Salzgitter AG were delivered to the Waelzholz Group. / more

| Corporate & markets Global footprint - Flexibility and reliability in the availability of materials

When it comes to the availability of its steel materials, Waelzholz meets the challenges associated with schedule and… / more

| Engineering Robotics in the cold rolling industry

Waelzholz is investing in robotic systems at its worldwide locations to maximize flexibility and precision in the… / more

WAELZHOLZ NEWSLETTER