Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Reducing vehicle weight is the most cost-effective means to reduce fuel consumption and greenhouse gases from the transportation sector. This has been emphasized in the Canadian Government's Innovation Strategy, and is one factor driving an increasing demand for new high strength, lightweight materials for a wide variety of applications. A considerable global research effort is currently directed towards developing such materials and the requisite industrial processing routes. New high strength, high formability steel and aluminum products will be particularly valuable, as these are the dominant alloys used in the transportation sector and are expected to continue leading the market for the next 10 to 20 years.        While traditional wisdom dictates that the more homogeneous the material, the better the properties, recent research has shown this is not always the case.  For example, materials with a heterogeneous spatial distribution of ultra-fine grains and large grains have a unique combination of high strength and high formability. Working closely with their industrial partners, Novelis, IPSCO, Dofasco and Stelco, the researchers are proposing a novel approach for the design and production of alloys with heterogeneous microstructures.      The proposed research will generate materials with a unique combination of strength and fracture resistance by enabling engineers to tailor the grain size distribution within an alloy.  It includes the development of new modelling tools for i) understanding how to produce these microstructures and ii) predicting the properties for a particular microstructure. The models will be tested experimentally in steel and aluminum, taking advantage of the synergies created through research on both metals together. The high-strength steel and aluminum alloys generated by this research will make it possible to use less metal in vehicle parts to obtain same level of strength, reducing vehicle weight.