News on China's scientific and technological development.
- Thread starter Quickie
- Start date
AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
Hendrik_2000
Lieutenant General
China can built domestic reactor 1/3 rd cheaper than in the west and faster too They are finishing the construction of 200 Mw pebble bed reactor
China small modular pebble beds will be $400 million for 200 MW and $1.2 billion for 600 MW
| August 15, 2017 |
from about $1900/kWe at the end of the 1990s to $3850/kWe in 2009.
In the 2015 report Projected Costs of Generating Electricity, the overnight costs ranged from $2021/kWe in South Korea to $6215/kWe in Hungary. For China, two comparable figures were $1807/kWe and $2615/kWe. LCOE figures at a 3% discount rate range from $29/MWh in Korea to $64/MWh in the UK, at a 7% discount rate from $40/MWh (Korea) to $101/MWh (UK), and at a 10% rate $51/MWh (Korea) to $136/MWh (UK).
CGN vice-president Zheng Dongshan said the cost would be “competitive” in the global 3G reactor market. Zheng said CGN and CNNC were both competitors and business partners with Westinghouse and Areva, depending on the project.
China will invest over US$100 billion to construct about seven new reactors annually between now and 2030.
China General Nuclear, and will cost only US$11.5 billion for over 6000 MWe, a third of the cost in western countries.
Changjang Unit 1, on Hainan Island, has also achieved criticality this year, and is expected to be delivering power by December, again just five years after construction began. A second unit will be completed next year. The total cost of this first pair of Chinese-designed 600 MW units is only about US$3.15 billion. Construction will begin on two additional units in 2018.
In 2015, Fangchenggang Unit 1 achieved criticality five years after construction began in Guangxi province, close to the Vietnam border, the first nuclear reactor in that province. Six reactors are planned at this site at a total cost of about US$12 billion.
5 years and about $2 billion per reactor has become routine for China.
Pebble bed high temperature reactors
China is finishing a 210 MW pebble bed reactor (High temperature pebble bed HTR-PM) in 2018.
China’s HTR-PM project is squarely aimed at being a cost-effective solution that will virtually eliminate air pollution and CO2 production from selected units of China’s large installed base of modern 600 MWe supercritical coal plants.
The commercial operation date is six to nine months later than scheduled when construction began, but Prof. Zhang Zuoyi proudly explained that the HTR-PM first-of-a-kind delays were much shorter than the 3-4 year delays that have plagued the EPR and AP1000 construction projects in their country.
The high temperature atomic boilers produce steam conditions that are identical to the design conditions for a large series of modern, 600 MWe steam plants that currently use coal as the heat source.
Prof. Zhang Zuoyi confirmed that some of the pebble-bed atomic boilers will be installed as replacement heat sources for existing steam plants. Those installations will be able to take advantage of the switchyards, the installed transmission networks, the cooling water systems, the sites and in some cases the entire steam plant including the steam turbine.
capacity. That number is based on signed and mostly executed contracts, not early estimates. It is about twice the initially expected cost. According to Zhang Zuoyi, 35% of the increased cost could be attributed to higher material and component costs that initially budgeted, 31% of the increase was due to increases in labor costs — which Zhang Zuoyi noted were rising rapidly in China — and the remainder due to the increased costs associated with the project delays.
Zhang Zuoyi described the techniques that will be applied to lower the costs; he expects them to soon approach the $2,000 to $2,500 / kw capacity range.
If this can be achieved then the 210 MW reactor would be $420 to $525 million. A 630 MW reactor would be $1.2 to $1.5 billion. It could be less if the 600 MW reactor only had to have the thermal unit and could use the turbine and other parts of an existing coal plant.
China small modular pebble beds will be $400 million for 200 MW and $1.2 billion for 600 MW
| August 15, 2017 |
from about $1900/kWe at the end of the 1990s to $3850/kWe in 2009.
In the 2015 report Projected Costs of Generating Electricity, the overnight costs ranged from $2021/kWe in South Korea to $6215/kWe in Hungary. For China, two comparable figures were $1807/kWe and $2615/kWe. LCOE figures at a 3% discount rate range from $29/MWh in Korea to $64/MWh in the UK, at a 7% discount rate from $40/MWh (Korea) to $101/MWh (UK), and at a 10% rate $51/MWh (Korea) to $136/MWh (UK).
CGN vice-president Zheng Dongshan said the cost would be “competitive” in the global 3G reactor market. Zheng said CGN and CNNC were both competitors and business partners with Westinghouse and Areva, depending on the project.
China will invest over US$100 billion to construct about seven new reactors annually between now and 2030.
China General Nuclear, and will cost only US$11.5 billion for over 6000 MWe, a third of the cost in western countries.
Changjang Unit 1, on Hainan Island, has also achieved criticality this year, and is expected to be delivering power by December, again just five years after construction began. A second unit will be completed next year. The total cost of this first pair of Chinese-designed 600 MW units is only about US$3.15 billion. Construction will begin on two additional units in 2018.
In 2015, Fangchenggang Unit 1 achieved criticality five years after construction began in Guangxi province, close to the Vietnam border, the first nuclear reactor in that province. Six reactors are planned at this site at a total cost of about US$12 billion.
5 years and about $2 billion per reactor has become routine for China.
Pebble bed high temperature reactors
China is finishing a 210 MW pebble bed reactor (High temperature pebble bed HTR-PM) in 2018.
China’s HTR-PM project is squarely aimed at being a cost-effective solution that will virtually eliminate air pollution and CO2 production from selected units of China’s large installed base of modern 600 MWe supercritical coal plants.
The commercial operation date is six to nine months later than scheduled when construction began, but Prof. Zhang Zuoyi proudly explained that the HTR-PM first-of-a-kind delays were much shorter than the 3-4 year delays that have plagued the EPR and AP1000 construction projects in their country.
The high temperature atomic boilers produce steam conditions that are identical to the design conditions for a large series of modern, 600 MWe steam plants that currently use coal as the heat source.
Prof. Zhang Zuoyi confirmed that some of the pebble-bed atomic boilers will be installed as replacement heat sources for existing steam plants. Those installations will be able to take advantage of the switchyards, the installed transmission networks, the cooling water systems, the sites and in some cases the entire steam plant including the steam turbine.
capacity. That number is based on signed and mostly executed contracts, not early estimates. It is about twice the initially expected cost. According to Zhang Zuoyi, 35% of the increased cost could be attributed to higher material and component costs that initially budgeted, 31% of the increase was due to increases in labor costs — which Zhang Zuoyi noted were rising rapidly in China — and the remainder due to the increased costs associated with the project delays.
Zhang Zuoyi described the techniques that will be applied to lower the costs; he expects them to soon approach the $2,000 to $2,500 / kw capacity range.
If this can be achieved then the 210 MW reactor would be $420 to $525 million. A 630 MW reactor would be $1.2 to $1.5 billion. It could be less if the 600 MW reactor only had to have the thermal unit and could use the turbine and other parts of an existing coal plant.
Last edited:
Hendrik_2000
Lieutenant General
From SCMP
“The heyday of the U.S nuclear industry was in 1970s. They were our role model,” said professor Shan of Xi’an Jiatong University. “But all those talents are now retired or gone. The current generation is no longer be able to build a new plant due to the lacking of engineering experience and technical expertise. It is sad.”
Yes it is sad indeed
China pips US in race to start the world’s first meltdown-proof nuclear power plant
China has 20 nuclear power plants under construction, more than any other country on earth. With Sanmen, the industry is hoping to get the nod to build more reactors at home, and even export the AP1000 technology.
PUBLISHED : Friday, 18 August, 2017, 9:33pm
UPDATED : Friday, 18 August, 2017, 10:52pm
At a small peninsula facing the East China Sea in Sanmen county in Zhejiang province sits the world’s most advanced nuclear reactor, and China’s clarion call to the clean energy industry.
Some day over the next two weeks, the power plant will start loading more than 100 fuel assemblies into the honeycomb core of its AP1000 reactor with a pair of robotic arms, people at the site said.
The arms will move at a snail’s pace, not only because each assembly costs more than 10 million yuan, but their fine metal rods hold millions of thumb-size uranium pallets which together can emit enough heat for more than one gigawatt of electricity, enough to power Tibet’s entire grid.
Many people are waiting with bated breath for Sanmen to go online, because the AP1000 “is a simple, genius solution to reduce the risk of nuclear meltdown,” said Xi’an Jiaotong University’s nuclear science professor Shan Jianqiang, the author of several university texts on reactor safety and operation. The commencement of Sanmen “can be a shot to the arm for the nuclear industry, which has been mired in trouble at home and abroad,” he said.
The AP1000, designed and made by Toshiba Corp’s Westinghouse Electric subsidiary, is equipped with an overhead water tank that can flush the reactor’s core and keep it cool even if every water pump ceases to function in a blackout. Hot water would rise as vapour, dissipating energy from the core’s chain reaction through a heat exchanger into the atmosphere, condense and return to the tank. As long as there is gravity, the cycle would continue without human intervention.
In plain language, the reactor is designed to be meltdown-proof.
Compared with current technology, the AP1000 reactor is theoretically 100 times safer, requires 80 per cent less piping, 85 per cent fewer control cables, and need a third fewer pumps.
A competing design is Europe’s Evolutionary Power Reactor (EPR), which theoretically matches the AP1000’s safety standards as it uses a container to catch the melted core in an accident to prevent radioactive leaks. Two EPR reactors are under construction in Taishan in Guangdong province, with the first scheduled for commissioning before the end of 2017, and the second by the first half of next year.
The impending fuel loading in Zhejiang, the final step before the reactor begins operation, would put China on the map as the first country to begin running arguably the most advanced power plant, overtaking the reactor designer’s home turf, where work has ceased on two reactors in South Carolina. Work on two AP1000 reactors are still underway in the neighbouring state of Georgia.
Sanmen’s birth was a long time coming, and has probably earned the dubious honour as China’s most severely delayed energy project. Construction began with much fanfare in 2009 after a 40 billion yuan (US$6 billion) investment between the United States and China, with plans to fire up the first of two reactors in 2013.
But the building site sat idle for years, awaiting the US supplier to redesign the reactor’s main pump -- which features so-called dual-use technology found in American nuclear submarines -- and obtain US exports approval, according to people familiar with the project.
The 2011 nuclear reactor meltdown in Japan’s Fukushima prefecture added to Sanmen’s delays, as it prompted the Chinese government to call an emergency halt on every power plant in China pending safety reviews, including Sanmen. Safety inspectors wanted Sanmen’s design to incorporate lessons learned from Fukushima’s meltdown, which added more delays.
Sanmen’s launch date was finally postponed from June to the end of this year, while Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy in March.
“We sincerely hope there will be no more delays,” a Westinghouse spokesperson in China said in response to the South China Morning Post. “The first AP1000 reactor is not only important to China, but the world.”
If the AP1000’s birth in China was difficult, its conception in its home country was almost doomed from the start. The US hadn’t built a new nuclear plant ever since an accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania in 1979.
Westinghouse’s AP1000, approved by nuclear authorities in the mid 2000s, was seen as the key to a new age of safe, accident-proof nuclear power industry.
The days of America’s “Nuclear Renaissance,” a term coined over a decade ago to describe a revival of cleaner alternatives to fossil fuel, were gone, said George Borovas, Tokyo-based partner and head of global nuclear group at Shearman & Sterling.
With a sharp drop in natural gas prices after the 2008 global financial crisis and surging supply of shale gas in the US, gas-fired power has become more competitive against nuclear power, he said.
At least some aspects of the dimming prospects of US nuclear energy are self inflicted. President Donald Trump’s Energy Independence Executive Order in March not only dismantled his predecessor’s 2015 Clean Power Plan, but also provide a disincentive to invest or develop any technology in clean energy, including nuclear power.
But America’s loss was China’s gain.
“The AP1000 technology has already been transferred to China and the Chinese projects are pretty close to commission, regardless of what the U.S project developers are going to do with their projects,” Borovas said.
China needs nuclear energy to reduce its dependence on fossil fuel imports, and to help the government meet its target of cutting emissions and pollution, he said.
Adding to the allure is the large number of jobs created, and the prospect of a lucrative export business in nuclear expertise and hardware. It’s no surprise then, that China’s state-owned and state-managed nuclear industry has jumped on the bandwagon with gusto.
“The nuclear industry is to embrace the biggest opportunity in recent years,” said Wang Shoujun, president of Sanmen’s owner China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC), wiring on his company’s website.
The Chinese state has given generous capital to not just nuclear power, but also small reactors, commercial reactors on floating platforms for offshore power generation, fast neutron reactors, molten salt reactors, accelerator-driven reactors, fusion power, and expects to create the world’s first stable-burning artificial sun for power generation within decades.
“In the nuclear power industry, you need long term stability, at least on project financing, which cannot be left entirely to the free market,” Borovas said. “China is developing the right model to support its long-term objective of clean, base-load power generation.”
China has 20 nuclear power plants under construction, more than any other country on earth. With the commissioning of Sanmen, the industry is hoping to get the nod to build more reactors at home, and even export the AP1000 technology.
Chinese researchers have even incorporated the best of AP1000 and EPR to conceive the Hualong design, featuring a top-side water tank and a catchment container. A Hualong reactor was sold to Pakistan, where construction began in 2015 scheduled for commissioning in late 2021. Another is currently awaiting the UK government’s review to build a plant.
Not everybody shares China’s optimism.
“While the deployment of AP1000 in China will be welcomed news for an otherwise beleaguered industry, it’s not clear that the conditions that could allow it to be successful there will prevail elsewhere,”said A.J. Goulding, a principal at London Economics International, an energy and infrastructure consulting firm. “To the extent that nuclear has a future in jurisdictions with low natural gas prices, limited load growth, and environmental sensitivities, it is in smaller, modular nuclear technologies.”
If there’s any doubt that China is leading the field, S.C. Electric & Gas and Santee Cooper, two energy vendors that had co-funded and led the construction of two AP1000 reactors in South Carolina, scrapped their project on July 31.
S.C. Electric, which had already spent US$9 billion of tax dollars on the project, estimated that it needs another US$7 billion for completion, which their customer the state grid can’t afford.
Earlier this year, the CNNC struck a deal with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to build a travelling wave reactor, a next-generation nuclear power technology with much higher fuel efficiency and little radioactive waste compared to today’s reactors. Chinese nuclear scientists were not at all surprised that Gates chose China instead of the U.S for the next step in clean energy.
“The heyday of the U.S nuclear industry was in 1970s. They were our role model,” said professor Shan of Xi’an Jiatong University. “But all those talents are now retired or gone. The current generation is no longer be able to build a new plant due to the lacking of engineering experience and technical expertise. It is sad.”
“The heyday of the U.S nuclear industry was in 1970s. They were our role model,” said professor Shan of Xi’an Jiatong University. “But all those talents are now retired or gone. The current generation is no longer be able to build a new plant due to the lacking of engineering experience and technical expertise. It is sad.”
Yes it is sad indeed
China pips US in race to start the world’s first meltdown-proof nuclear power plant
China has 20 nuclear power plants under construction, more than any other country on earth. With Sanmen, the industry is hoping to get the nod to build more reactors at home, and even export the AP1000 technology.
PUBLISHED : Friday, 18 August, 2017, 9:33pm
UPDATED : Friday, 18 August, 2017, 10:52pm
At a small peninsula facing the East China Sea in Sanmen county in Zhejiang province sits the world’s most advanced nuclear reactor, and China’s clarion call to the clean energy industry.
Some day over the next two weeks, the power plant will start loading more than 100 fuel assemblies into the honeycomb core of its AP1000 reactor with a pair of robotic arms, people at the site said.
The arms will move at a snail’s pace, not only because each assembly costs more than 10 million yuan, but their fine metal rods hold millions of thumb-size uranium pallets which together can emit enough heat for more than one gigawatt of electricity, enough to power Tibet’s entire grid.
Many people are waiting with bated breath for Sanmen to go online, because the AP1000 “is a simple, genius solution to reduce the risk of nuclear meltdown,” said Xi’an Jiaotong University’s nuclear science professor Shan Jianqiang, the author of several university texts on reactor safety and operation. The commencement of Sanmen “can be a shot to the arm for the nuclear industry, which has been mired in trouble at home and abroad,” he said.
The AP1000, designed and made by Toshiba Corp’s Westinghouse Electric subsidiary, is equipped with an overhead water tank that can flush the reactor’s core and keep it cool even if every water pump ceases to function in a blackout. Hot water would rise as vapour, dissipating energy from the core’s chain reaction through a heat exchanger into the atmosphere, condense and return to the tank. As long as there is gravity, the cycle would continue without human intervention.
In plain language, the reactor is designed to be meltdown-proof.
Compared with current technology, the AP1000 reactor is theoretically 100 times safer, requires 80 per cent less piping, 85 per cent fewer control cables, and need a third fewer pumps.
A competing design is Europe’s Evolutionary Power Reactor (EPR), which theoretically matches the AP1000’s safety standards as it uses a container to catch the melted core in an accident to prevent radioactive leaks. Two EPR reactors are under construction in Taishan in Guangdong province, with the first scheduled for commissioning before the end of 2017, and the second by the first half of next year.
The impending fuel loading in Zhejiang, the final step before the reactor begins operation, would put China on the map as the first country to begin running arguably the most advanced power plant, overtaking the reactor designer’s home turf, where work has ceased on two reactors in South Carolina. Work on two AP1000 reactors are still underway in the neighbouring state of Georgia.
Sanmen’s birth was a long time coming, and has probably earned the dubious honour as China’s most severely delayed energy project. Construction began with much fanfare in 2009 after a 40 billion yuan (US$6 billion) investment between the United States and China, with plans to fire up the first of two reactors in 2013.
But the building site sat idle for years, awaiting the US supplier to redesign the reactor’s main pump -- which features so-called dual-use technology found in American nuclear submarines -- and obtain US exports approval, according to people familiar with the project.
The 2011 nuclear reactor meltdown in Japan’s Fukushima prefecture added to Sanmen’s delays, as it prompted the Chinese government to call an emergency halt on every power plant in China pending safety reviews, including Sanmen. Safety inspectors wanted Sanmen’s design to incorporate lessons learned from Fukushima’s meltdown, which added more delays.
Sanmen’s launch date was finally postponed from June to the end of this year, while Westinghouse filed for bankruptcy in March.
“We sincerely hope there will be no more delays,” a Westinghouse spokesperson in China said in response to the South China Morning Post. “The first AP1000 reactor is not only important to China, but the world.”
If the AP1000’s birth in China was difficult, its conception in its home country was almost doomed from the start. The US hadn’t built a new nuclear plant ever since an accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania in 1979.
Westinghouse’s AP1000, approved by nuclear authorities in the mid 2000s, was seen as the key to a new age of safe, accident-proof nuclear power industry.
The days of America’s “Nuclear Renaissance,” a term coined over a decade ago to describe a revival of cleaner alternatives to fossil fuel, were gone, said George Borovas, Tokyo-based partner and head of global nuclear group at Shearman & Sterling.
With a sharp drop in natural gas prices after the 2008 global financial crisis and surging supply of shale gas in the US, gas-fired power has become more competitive against nuclear power, he said.
At least some aspects of the dimming prospects of US nuclear energy are self inflicted. President Donald Trump’s Energy Independence Executive Order in March not only dismantled his predecessor’s 2015 Clean Power Plan, but also provide a disincentive to invest or develop any technology in clean energy, including nuclear power.
But America’s loss was China’s gain.
“The AP1000 technology has already been transferred to China and the Chinese projects are pretty close to commission, regardless of what the U.S project developers are going to do with their projects,” Borovas said.
China needs nuclear energy to reduce its dependence on fossil fuel imports, and to help the government meet its target of cutting emissions and pollution, he said.
Adding to the allure is the large number of jobs created, and the prospect of a lucrative export business in nuclear expertise and hardware. It’s no surprise then, that China’s state-owned and state-managed nuclear industry has jumped on the bandwagon with gusto.
“The nuclear industry is to embrace the biggest opportunity in recent years,” said Wang Shoujun, president of Sanmen’s owner China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC), wiring on his company’s website.
The Chinese state has given generous capital to not just nuclear power, but also small reactors, commercial reactors on floating platforms for offshore power generation, fast neutron reactors, molten salt reactors, accelerator-driven reactors, fusion power, and expects to create the world’s first stable-burning artificial sun for power generation within decades.
“In the nuclear power industry, you need long term stability, at least on project financing, which cannot be left entirely to the free market,” Borovas said. “China is developing the right model to support its long-term objective of clean, base-load power generation.”
China has 20 nuclear power plants under construction, more than any other country on earth. With the commissioning of Sanmen, the industry is hoping to get the nod to build more reactors at home, and even export the AP1000 technology.
Chinese researchers have even incorporated the best of AP1000 and EPR to conceive the Hualong design, featuring a top-side water tank and a catchment container. A Hualong reactor was sold to Pakistan, where construction began in 2015 scheduled for commissioning in late 2021. Another is currently awaiting the UK government’s review to build a plant.
Not everybody shares China’s optimism.
“While the deployment of AP1000 in China will be welcomed news for an otherwise beleaguered industry, it’s not clear that the conditions that could allow it to be successful there will prevail elsewhere,”said A.J. Goulding, a principal at London Economics International, an energy and infrastructure consulting firm. “To the extent that nuclear has a future in jurisdictions with low natural gas prices, limited load growth, and environmental sensitivities, it is in smaller, modular nuclear technologies.”
If there’s any doubt that China is leading the field, S.C. Electric & Gas and Santee Cooper, two energy vendors that had co-funded and led the construction of two AP1000 reactors in South Carolina, scrapped their project on July 31.
S.C. Electric, which had already spent US$9 billion of tax dollars on the project, estimated that it needs another US$7 billion for completion, which their customer the state grid can’t afford.
Earlier this year, the CNNC struck a deal with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to build a travelling wave reactor, a next-generation nuclear power technology with much higher fuel efficiency and little radioactive waste compared to today’s reactors. Chinese nuclear scientists were not at all surprised that Gates chose China instead of the U.S for the next step in clean energy.
“The heyday of the U.S nuclear industry was in 1970s. They were our role model,” said professor Shan of Xi’an Jiatong University. “But all those talents are now retired or gone. The current generation is no longer be able to build a new plant due to the lacking of engineering experience and technical expertise. It is sad.”
Hendrik_2000
Lieutenant General
Scientific development - "Internet of things" to make the grid more intelligent The world's largest "virtual power plant" was born in Jiangsu
There is so much energy loss along the grid Lately China improve their grid network into intelligent grid
There is so much energy loss along the grid Lately China improve their grid network into intelligent grid
Jura The idiot
General
Jun 27, 2017
China to speed up bullet trains on Beijing-Shanghai route in Sept.
Xinhua| 2017-08-20 20:25:56
and
China to speed up bullet trains on Beijing-Shanghai route in Sept.
Xinhua| 2017-08-20 20:25:56
AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
Not sure if this was brought up in this forum. News to me if stories were posted when it first broke. I hadn't read anything of this except a thread posted on the Chinese forums a while back where there was outage because it charged the US was expecting China to share this technology. Well I didn't take it seriously and I couldn't find any real articles about it. With all this news of quantum this and quantum that, I thought I might've been reading a bad translation. But here it is.
Cambricon Raises US$100 Million In Series A Funding Cambricon, a China-based artificial intelligence chipmaker, has joined the ranks of tech unicorns with its recent round of series A funding.
AsianScientist (Aug. 23, 2017) - Cambricon, an artificial intelligence (AI) chipmaker based in China, has raised US$100 million in series A funding led by SDIC Chuangye Investment Management, a subsidiary of China’s State Development and Investment Corporation. The funding round attracted prominent investors such as e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, computer manufacturer Lenovo, robotics company Zhongke Tuling Century Beijing Technology and the investment arm of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Just four months earlier in April 2016, Cambricon had received US$1.4 million from the CAS. Debuting on the AI scene in 2016, Cambricon was founded by Professor Chen Tianshi as a spin-off from the Institute of Computing Technology of the CAS. Its flagship processor, the Cambricon-1A, is the first commercial chip for deep learning applications and can be used in robotics, drones, autonomous vehicles and consumer electronics. Compared to existing processors, the Cambricon-1A boasts better performance when running mainstream AI algorithms, is more energy efficient and has a higher integration density, making it ideal for incorporation into mobile devices. The latest round of funding puts Cambricon in the league of unicorns which refer to private companies with a total valuation of more than US$1 billion. The funds will be used for the development of high performance cloud computing platforms and the commercialization of devices such as smartphones and wearables.
Quickie
Colonel
Chinese scientists make breakthrough in super steel
WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- Chinese scientists said Thursday they have developed a super steel that has a high level of both strength and ductility, a breakthrough that may have a wide variety of industrial applications.
Furthermore, its material cost is just one-fifth of that of the steel used in the current aerospace and defence applications, they reported in the U.S. journal Science.
Strength and ductility are desirable properties of metallic materials for wide-ranging applications, but increasing strength often leads to the decrease in ductility, which is known as the strength-ductility trade-off.
A Hong Kong-Beijing-Taiwan mechanical engineering team led by Huang Mingxin from the University of Hong Kong adopted a new manufacturing technique called deformed and partitioned (D&P) to addressed the problem.
"Steels have been the most widely used metallic materials in the history of mankind and can be produced with much higher efficiency than any other metallic materials," the team said in a statement.
"Therefore developing a strong and ductile breakthrough steel has been a long quest since the beginning of Iron Age in mankind history."
The team explained that it is very difficult to further improve the ductility of metallic materials when their yield strength is beyond two Gigapascal (GPa).
Now, they made "a successful attempt in realizing the above dream" as the newly developed method yields a "breakthrough steel" that has the "unprecedented" yield strength of 2.2 GPa and uniform elongation of 16 percent.
"The developed D&P steel demonstrated the best combination of yield strength and uniform elongation among all existing high-strength metallic materials," the researchers said.
"In particular, the uniform elongation of the developed D&P steel is much higher than that of metallic materials with yield strength beyond 2.0 GPa."
According to the team, the "breakthrough steel" belongs to the system of so-called medium manganese steel that contains 10 percent manganese, 0.47 percent carbon, 2.0 percent aluminium and 0.7 percent vanadium.
"No expensive alloying elements have been used exhaustively but just some common alloying compositions that can be widely seen in the commercialized steels," they said.
Another advantage is that this steel can be developed using conventional industrial processing routes, including warm rolling, cold rolling and annealing.
"This is different from the development of other metallic materials where the fabrication processes involve complex routes and special equipment, which are difficult to scale-up," said the team.
"Therefore, it is expected that the present breakthrough steel has a great potential for industrial mass production."
The research outcome was a collective contribution from scientists at the University of Hong Kong, University of Science and Technology Beijing, City University of Hong Kong, and a university in Taiwan.