Advanced High Strength Steels have been gaining ground in an automotive industry hunting for all the weight savings it can while satisfying or surpassing safety standards. The material could be called the next step in steel’s evolution toward exhibiting the high-strength, lightweight characteristics of more expensive materials, like aluminum and magnesium.
Challenges arise, however, from a formability standpoint. The varieties of AHSS do exhibit high formability, but in entirely different ways from legacy materials. Springback isn’t the only concern – metal formers need to throw out the old rulebooks. AHSS has spurred stampers to think about metal forming in new, unconventional ways.
