Invited Resource Only Strategic Equipment bid for Rapid Alloy Processing

To be globally competitive the UK steel industry must rapidly respond to the increasing demand for steel (in the UK this is expected to grow to £6.0bn by 2030, from £3.8bn in 2018) by supplying improved products (higher strength, lower cost, improved formability etc). Current lead times for new product and process development are far too long to enable capture of new market opportunities, with high development costs as full trials can often require 100's tonnes production that are not sold. There is a need to accelerate this development via the use of small-scale development programmes and innovative thinking both within and external to the steel companies. A rapid alloy processing (RAP) facility has been developed at the Advanced Steel Research Centre (ASRC) in WMG, that comprises casting (1 - 7 kg), hot and cold rolling, heat treatment, mechanical and microstructural characterisation, along with bespoke systems to investigate processability issues. A number of steel grades produced via the RAP facility have been benchmarked against industrial production and properties to ensure robustness of the process. The RAP facility compliments existing very small lab scale (10-100's grams) production of new alloys, either by experimental combinatorial fabrication or computational alloy design processes, by providing an opportunity to carry out more representative scale processing and explore often overlooked issues of processability in a rapid manner before committing to expensive pilot plant and production trials. The RAP facility is therefore an enabler to developing new thinking and translating novel concepts to practical benefit. It is being used to support internal research projects in the ASRC and a growing number of external activities with universities, industries and SMEs. This proposal is to fund a full time technician to work on the RAP facility to support research and industry / business use; this is required as some equipment needs two people to operate (for example hot rolling) and the specialist nature of hot metal processing means that a trained operator is necessary to deliver external requests. Growth in use of the facility will generate income which will allow us to sustainably fund the position to continue to support users and deliver quality results.