High-performant non-oriented electrical steels with a silicon content beyond today's limits: new materials for an electrified future

Research Fund for Coal and Steel RFCS

Edition of the competition: RFCS-2022

Project title: High-performant non-oriented electrical steels with a silicon content beyond today's limits: new materials for an electrified future

Agreement number: 101112518

Project implementation period: 01.09.2023 - 28.02.2027

Project value: 2 055 154,65 EURO (9 197 639,12 PLN)

Funds granted for Lublin University of Technology: 189 807 00 EURO (849 462,25 PLN)

Principal Investigator: prof. dr hab. Elżbieta Jartych

Abstract: Every year, billions of euros worth of electrical energy are wasted world-wide, due to the suboptimal properties of the materials used as magnetic components in power electronics (electric machines such as transformers, motors or generators). The magnetic material that is most often used for this purpose is an iron-silicon electrical steel grade with about 3 wt.% silicon content. It has been known since long that increasing the silicon content to 6.5 wt.% would be much better. Electric machines could be built that are lighter, more compact and more energy efficient. The reason why this has not become reality yet, is that steels with that amount of silicon are too brittle to be used in actual devices. The recent literature shows promising examples where electrical steel with a larger silicon content have been made, while avoiding the brittleness. This is done by alloying Fe-Si with additional elements, and by post-processing the steel in particular ways. There are many degrees of freedom for doing so, and the literature reports only isolated and fragmented results. Moreover, most of the successful procedures are not suitable to scale them up to an industrial production. And insight in the mechanisms behind the observed behaviour is lacking, in particular about the relation between the order-disorder transition in Fe-Si and the onset of brittleness. In this project we propose to study the alloying and processing of Fe-Si in a systematic way, by a complementary arsenal of rolling techniques, global and local characterization methods and ab initio simulations. The results of this project will allow steel makers to devise production and processing procedures to make superior electrical steel grades.