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.
