Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Packaging steels are used in a myriad of everyday products from food and beverage containers to closures and utensils. This application of steel increasingly requires a combination of high formability with high strength. Formability is demanded for increasingly complex shapes while improved strength allows for reduced sheet thickness resulting in weight savings. Coupled to these design constraints are cost, recyclability and surface characteristics. Such combinations of properties are difficult to achieve and thus limits are traditionally placed on the strength and thickness of packaging steels. We seek in this proposal to overcome the limitations imposed by traditional strengthening mechanisms in ultra-low carbon packaging steels through the use of a novel processing route involving the vapour deposition of a thin layer of iron highly supersaturated in carbon to the surface of thin steel sheet. This will be followed by controlled annealing to generate a compositionally graded hybrid composite. This route will allow for substantial increases in strength of the product without the significant decrease in ductility associated with conventional strengthening methods used for packaging steels. Moreover, this processing route is compatible with the flow of packaging steels (including subsequent coating technologies) and as it only involves the addition of carbon to the sheet, it does not degrade the material's recyclability. This project falls under the NSERC strategic Grants priority area of Competitive Manufacturing in the sub-topic of hybrid composite materials. Moreover, this project is being submitted under the NSERC-ANR Concurrent Call for Joint Research Proposals. A strongly collaborative research project has been built combining the expertise of the Canadian team in materials fabrication and mechanical testing with the French team's expertise in materials characterization and modelling. Moreover, the industrial supporter of this project, having facilities in both Canada and France, will play a strong role by participating in the experimental work and allowing graduate students to perform research at their facilities.