Steel assures mobility in the automotive industry

We make things lighter 
For powertrain and chassis/suspension components in passenger and commercial vehicles, lightweight engineering has become a topic of continuously growing significance. GMH Gruppe experts have joined forces with other specialists in the “Lightweight Forging Initiative”, a research project that has generated no less than 1,917 ideas, with a total weight reduction potential of 358 kg. Our ultra-light components are already in service today in numerous applications, including, for example, our innovative 46MnVS5 grade – a high-strength steel which makes crack piston rods 10% lighter.

The vehicles of the future are the hybrids. Our e-mobility project teams constantly study the development potential provided by steel in electric vehicle engineering for potential technological innovations for the vehicles of tomorrow. The hybrid electric passenger car, for example: as a result of the downsizing of the electric motor, the role of steel as a lightweighting material is becoming ever more important – in the form of high-strength, compact and heat-resistant forged steel pistons in diesel vehicles, for example.

In close cooperation with customers from the automotive industry, we have developed two new steels: 16MnCrV7-7, a bainitic forging steel, and 50CrMnB5-3, a steel hardened by inductive heating after the warm-forming process. The key advantage of these steels is that their production requires much less energy. Our capability of adjusting the properties of high-strength steels precisely to the individual requirements of the application makes us the first port of call for all questions concerning energy-efficiency in steelmaking

Its microstructure, above all else, is what gives steel its specific mechanical properties. Our experts employ a high-speed, proprietary simulation program and a large range of data-mining methods to calculate each steel's target properties to the highest degree of accuracy.

To help us guarantee unsurpassed precision and quality, our quality assurance system itself goes well beyond the usual standards. We use laser triangulation, for example, to inspect the contours of sections for use in door hinges, and our Calipri Hot gauge, an in-house invention, for inspection of rolled sections.

The sustainability of products and processes is also a vehement demand made on the automotive industry. Our steels serve this objective throughout the entire process chain: ultra-efficient materials recycling and the optimisation of our logistics and production processes enable us to protect the climate and conserve resources to the limits of what is technically achievable.

Our more than twenty group companies network and interact with extreme efficiency across their individual fields of activity – from the production and processing of the steel, via technological application development, up to and including R&D. Being geographically close to the customer and situated in the centre of Europe, we also benefit from the continent’s robust and dependable infrastructure, and can thus assure for our customers indisputable competitive advantages in terms of delivery reliability and flexibility.