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Processing high-strength steels: led by automobile manufacturers, demand for high-strength steels is spreading. Service centers and processors must adjust to the new challenges of cutting and slitting this stronger material.

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FUELED BY THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY'S DESIRE to improve crash protection while reducing vehicle weight and increasing fuel economy, the steel industry has been highly successful at developing new high-strength and advanced-high-strength steels over the past two decades. Those alloys are steadily finding applications outside the automotive sector and working their way into service center inventories. But this new generation of steel calls for a new generation of processing equipment.

"It's a trend that's catching on. If they see it in the automotive area, it's only a matter of time before it's wanted in appliance, heavy truck, heavy equipment or agriculture," says Tom Bell, vice president of business development for Bohler-Uddeholm Corp., Elgin, Ill. "Anytime a part can be made thinner and stronger, there's an advantage to that. It will certainly catch on."

For service center operators, the market appeal of the material is offset somewhat by the challenges it poses in processing. While those challenges are significant, experts say, they can be managed.

Though high-strength steel is not a brand new concept, there remains much uncertainty about leveling, slitting and shearing the stronger steels, says Eric Theis, who spent 30 years in the equipment-manufacturing sector before becoming a consultant to the metals industry. "I'm making a living answering those questions."

When mild steel was the common option, with a 60,000 psi tensile strength and 40,000 yield, running a leveler was pretty easy, Theis explains. "When I started in the fiat-rolled business in the 1960s, we'd tell the leveler operators to get a little black book. See what settings worked and write them in the book--the entry setting, the entry gap setting and the exit gap setting. They didn't even know what the yield was because nobody told them," Theis recalls.

(In simple terms, yield is the force needed to overcome metal's elasticity or tendency to return to its original shape, which is the minimum pressure that must be applied by...

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