Abstract
This paper provides an overview of recent steel market developments considering also the global steel oversupply as well as the installed and planned capacity as recessions in some emerging economies. Especially the enormous Chinese investments combined with their actually decreasing demand are a major reason for the deterioration on the steel market. The general steel demand also declines due to slow growth or even reductions in technology fields like ship building, thermal power plants, infrastructural needs, or even the automotive industry. Nevertheless, environmental and energy-efficient production routes are of primary interest, partly handled by thin strip production processes. TMCP (thermo-mechanical controlled processing) remains a main research field for many applications. Increased demands are expected regarding enhanced strength for light-weight design, improved toughness to ensure safety in case of earthquakes and fires, or improved formability to overcome geometrical limits. New steel grades like bainitic steels, nano-crystalline materials, TWIP-steel or grain-oriented electrical sheet metals have led to advanced quality criteria also for rolling plants. Furthermore, steel has to stay competitive against lightweight metals, CFK, and plastics. Some examples of recent innovative processing optimizations are described requiring not only process monitoring but also model-based simulation and real-time online control. Finally, the article states that new holistic strategies are necessary to overcome future challenges.
Highlights
The current economic situation in the steel producing industry is characterized by a high overcapacity worldwide
The microstructural evolution using TMCP from the reheating furnace to the coiler is nowadays quite well understood and the describing equations for the prediction of temperature distribution, kinetics of static and dynamic recrystallization, precipitations, and phase transformations kinetics have been derived for many steel grades
Nowadays plates and strips are produced with high quality as well as by novel automation and control systems within narrow ranges
Summary
The current economic situation in the steel producing industry is characterized by a high overcapacity worldwide. There are two exceptional growth periods, one after the Second World War and one described as the Chinese steel boom starting in the late nineties. The higher volume of exports compared to the imports in China, as shown, has led to some deterioration, which can be seen, with respect to the development of the steel prices for hot and cold rolled coils in the period between 1998 and 2016. When doing such a market study, some side effects become obvious. They can only be explained by temporal dependencies, such as the event of the Olympic Summer Games
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