Project Details
Projekt
Impurity-Tolerant Alloy Design of High-Strength Electrical Steel
Applicants
Professor Dr.-Ing. Tilmann Beck; Dr.-Ing. Marion Cornelia Kreins; Professor Dr.-Ing. Ulrich Krupp; Dr.-Ing. Marek Smaga
Subject Area
Mechanical Properties of Metallic Materials and their Microstructural Origins
Term
since 2025
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 562096339
The trends towards electrification and circular economy will require an increasing amount of recycling steel grades also in the sector of electrical steel. While the alloy and process design of electrical steel has been focused on both the mechanical and the magnetic properties, the design of highly efficient and flexible operating electro motors for electromobility needs to account for mechanical fatigue strength, the magnetic degradation (functional fatigue), and the impurity tolerance. The mechanical and magnetic properties of electrical steels are related to each other at the microstructural level. Therefore, both must be considered in the design of impurity tolerant alloys. Depending on the alloy chemistry and the heat treatment procedure, the size of precipitates, e.g., carbo nitrides or copper, may strongly alter the mechanical and magnetic properties. The development of a digital twin accompanied by an experimental high throughput study of electrical steel grades with varying chemistry and tailored thermomechanical treatment will provide a pathway towards future steel design within a circular economy. Based on individual research on the mechanical and functional fatigue of electrical steel as well as on strengthening effects in Cu alloyed steels, the collaboration between WKK at RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau and IEHK at RWTH Aachen University will represent the value chain of modern electrical steel. For Integrated Computational Material Engineering (ICME) guided steel design, IEHK will use advanced simulation tools for precipitation and recrystallization prediction that will be informed by an experimental study, where the parameters, chemical composition, hot and cold forming and heat treatment, will be systematically varied. WKK will use short-term methods such as Cyclic Indentation Tests (CITs) to characterize the mechanical properties, as well as micromagnetic 3MA measurements to determine the magnetic properties of a large number of alloy designs using small sample volumes. This will provide a basis for the systematic study of mechanical and magnetic properties and the evaluation of a sufficiently large data set for further inverse materials design. Multiscale crystallographic microstructure descriptors will be fed by ML-assisted metallography of light microscopy and electron microscopy (SEM, TEM), atom probe tomography (APT)). Using characterization methods, like X-ray diffraction and micromagnetic sensors (3MA), non-destructive microstructural and functional damage monitoring will be accomplished to correlate the material's microstructure with the mechanical properties.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
