7. Future prospects

7.1 Materials evolution

Readers are referred to the article Sheet metal for shaping in this treatise.

Over the past twenty years, developments in metallurgy and steelmaking processes have led to the development of plates with improved deformability and service properties.

Today, we are seeing the emergence of steels that simultaneously offer these two types of advantages, in the form of highly deformable grades whose usage characteristics are developed during processing, either by work hardening itself, or by temperature effects on the work hardened structure during the paint baking phase (bake hardening steels), or by metallurgical transformation induced by plastic deformation (TRIP steels).

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