Fasteel History

Since the mid 80’s, vehicle weights have increased despite the importance of vehicle weight on driving dynamics, agility, and fuel consumption. The trend of ever-increasing weight of cars has been curtailed in recent years, predominantly motivated by CO₂ emission targets and correlated penalties, through the increased use of composites, plastics, light alloys and advanced and ultra-high-strength steels. The increasing use of components made of these lighter materials can reduce car weights and life cycle emissions very considerably.

The previously mentioned light-weight components have to be produced by an appropriate material forming process, such as plastic injection moulding, die casting of light alloys, resin transfer moulding (RTM), hot stamping, and forging amongst others. In all these processes, dies, moulds, and in general terms tools, are used to shape the components. Besides the geometrical shaping functionality, the tools play an important role as heat transfer media and in controlling the heating and cooling rate mechanism during the forming process. Shaping components with these new materials often requires tailored heating and cooling of the corresponding forming tool, along with specific tool surface features and mechanical properties that can respond to the rheological and tribological behavior of the component material and to the resulting thermo-mechanical solicitations during part production. Traditionally used hot work tool steels types, such as 1.2343, 1.2344, 1.2365, etc., do not combine all these required properties to ensure a reproducible and cost-effective forming of the components made of these innovative materials. Especially the low level of thermal conductivity and the mechanical and surface properties under working conditions of tools made with traditionally used tool materials limit the introduction of components made of light weight, high strength materials to the relevant industries.

As pioneer of the high thermal conductivity hot work tool steels, ROVALMA SA has successfully developed and verified a prototype hot work tool steel, that offers very high levels of thermal conductivity, along with high levels of tribological and mechanical properties. The flexibility offered by FASTEEL, especially in terms of machining, welding, surface treatments, fast and easy hardening, tool size, large range of working hardness, etc., means that FASTEEL can be applied as high performance tool material across many applications combined with the related advanced heating, cooling and surface technologies, allowing the production of large and geometrically challenging lightweight pieces made from advanced component materials.

In this SME phase 2 project FASTEEL will be demonstrated and evaluated by several market leading clients in the automobile components sector, in the different key production processes – plastic injection moulding, die casting and hot stamping-, to assess FASTEEL’s performance at producing high strength, large, lightweight components.