How thin and light stainless steel can be? The answer given today is 0.015mm.
Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “precision belt company”) on the product stand, a stainless steel foil body bright, reflecting a mirror-like silver luster, its thickness is only 0.015mm, less than 1/6 of the diameter of a hair.
Pick up the foil, it can be bent and folded like paper, and even gently force the foil can be torn open with bare hands. Compared to the “TISCO stainless steel precision foil” as the scientific name, it also has a more graphic and more widely known name – “hand torn steel”.
Despite the ultra-thin thickness, but “hand torn steel” still has high strength, toughness, corrosion resistance, oxidation resistance, high shielding and other excellent characteristics, widely used in aerospace, medical equipment, precision instruments, new energy and other high-precision equipment manufacturing industry, known as “the crown jewel of the steel industry! It is known as “the crown jewel of the steel industry”.
Recently, in the State Council State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission News Center hosted ten dimensions to see China – “into the new state-owned enterprises – card new coordinates” network interactive communication activities, surging news (www.thepaper.cn) reporter went into the TISCO Group and TISCO Precision Belt Company, card China “thickness”, to pursue TISCO through scientific and technological hard power to create “hundred refined steel into a soft” story.
Liao Xi, Chief Precision Foil Process Engineer of Precision Strip Company, told the reporter that “hand-torn steel” refers to ultra-thin precision stainless steel strip with a thickness of 0.05mm or less, which is a key basic material in the cutting-edge fields of aerospace, high-end electronics, new energy, and so on, and it has been produced in only a few countries, and its width is less than 400mm.
TISCO Precision Strip Company took 3 years to overcome 175 equipment problems and 452 process problems, and finally made an independent breakthrough in 2018 with five core process technologies such as steel purity, production line process, control level, high-grade surface accuracy, product performance, etc., and developed “hand-torn steel” with a thickness of 0.02mm and a width of 640mm “Well formed mass production.
In August 2020, TISCO and “hand torn steel” thinnest thickness rolled to 0.015mm, creating a new world record, realizing the import-dependent to the world’s leading leap. This foil is technically demanding and difficult to produce, and its successful development has made TISCO the only company in the world that can mass produce wide soft stainless steel foil products.
“Recently we (on the basis of 0.015mm) have continued to try, and we can probably go up to 12 microns (0.012mm).” Duan Haojie, director of the R&D center of Precision Belt Company, introduced that the difficulty of manufacturing ultra-thin hand-torn steel increases exponentially as the thickness decreases, and every breakthrough of 0.001mm is a great challenge in technology. Despite the great difficulty, but with the scientific research continuing to break through, the future of 0.012mm or even breakthrough 0.01mm and realize the mass production aspect is still worth looking forward to. He particularly pointed out that from 0.02mm to 0.015mm to thinner steel foil, which seems to be a subtle difference in the industrial difference is huge. Take batteries as an example, the same volume of batteries, using 0.015mm material manufacturing, its battery capacity can increase by 17%.
“‘Hand torn steel’ represents a direction that drives changes in high-end manufacturing raw materials, the company’s annual revenue growth rate of 80% in the past two years, but only the first step.” Precision strip steel R & D team’s new intention is to continue to expand the “hand torn steel” performance and application areas, ultra-flat, ultra-thin, ultra-hard, ultra-smooth “hand torn steel”, is the direction of their research and development efforts.