The company is significantly expanding its range of full-finish products for car body panels — products that have superior, more attractive surface quality as well as being easier to form into complex shapes¹, reducing processing costs and offering greater affordability.
 
The new products were developed by Tata Steel’s research and development teams in Europe. They will be produced at all or some of the company’s automotive galvanizing facilities at Llanwern, Newport, in South Wales, Segal, near Liège in Belgium and IJmuiden in the Netherlands.
 
Henrik Adam, chief commercial officer of Tata Steel’s European operations, said: “We are committed to working in partnership with our customers to deliver the products they need. Creating a great finish on automotive parts, particularly the exposed panels which are responsible for the look of a new car, is naturally an essential part of the vehicle production process. Because these new products are all made using the sustainable, low-cost hot-dip galvanizing process they also offer manufacturers significant cost benefits².”
 
The new Serica™ product is a premium hot-dip galvanized coating offering a superior surface finish. Serica guarantees low waviness after forming³, providing customers with the highest possible surface quality and paint appearance for exposed automotive panels. It also enables a consistently excellent paint finish even when thinner or fewer paint layers are used.
 
The second product is a new kind of highly formable hot-dip galvanized steel. DX57-GI Hyperform steel has excellent deep drawing and stretching properties, enabling automotive engineers to design more complex parts for vehicle exteriors and interiors. As a result, they will be able to design vehicles that look more attractive to their customers as well as having better functionality⁴.
 
In a third enhancement of its full-finish automotive range, Tata Steel has integrated its innovative MagiZinc Auto zinc-magnesium coating technology into its widest hot-dip galvanizing line, DVL3, at IJmuiden. DVL3 can now coat sheet in widths of up to 2,020 millimeters using the MagiZinc Auto coating that the company launched in 20115.
 
This expansion of the MagiZinc Auto size range will better serve the needs of customers, who will be able to use the wider specification now available for large inner vehicle panels and in 2015 for outer panels as well. The extra wide material will have all the advantages of MagiZinc Auto’s excellent corrosion resistance and improved ease of processing by manufacturers.
 
Sander Heinhuis, Tata Steel’s European Marketing Manager for Automotive, said: “By using steels with the new Serica surface quality customers can achieve an excellent paint appearance on exposed body panels while at the same time using a sustainable hot-dip galvanized coating process. Through using the DX57-GI HyperForm product our customers can create the components needed for better looking cars, at lower cost than ever before. And the start of production of MagiZinc coated steels on the DVL3 line allows us to manufacture the widest advanced zinc coated steel sheets on the market worldwide, while ensuring high surface quality and short delivery times."
 
¹ Formability: the ability of metal to undergo plastic deformation without being damaged.

² In the automotive industry the challenge is to balance weight performance and cost. Total Cost of Ownership includes all costs over the value chain. Understanding the true costs, direct and indirect, their relative importance and how they can be contained is critically important.

³ To achieve the desired look of a finished part, the roughness of the steel’s surface is very important, particularly the surface waviness – i.e. the long-wave roughness of the surface, visible to the human eye. To produce steel with guaranteed low waviness and ensure stable operational performance, Tata Steel has developed and implemented various process adaptations throughout the steels’ multi-step production process. These adaptations result in low surface waviness that is very predictable and enable Tata Steel to guarantee the maximum waviness of a deep drawn part.

⁴ Typical applications include particularly complex exposed automotive parts such as bodysides and trunk lids. In addition DX57-GI HyperForm can be processed through customers’ existing lines and guarantees a low reject rate, ensuring improved press shop efficiency. 

⁵ Tata Steel developed MagiZinc Auto to address the existing challenges of corrosion resistance and press shop processing. This innovative zinc-magnesium coating significantly reduces and slows corrosion where paint damage occurs, due to the level of magnesium in the alloy. As a result the coating offers the same corrosion protection with a much thinner coating. Due to its microstructure, MagiZinc Auto transfers far fewer zinc particles to manufacturers’ tools compared to other coatings during processing. This reduction in tool pollution in turn lowers the total cost of ownership.