Mazda Steel Stamping Breakthrough

As vehicle manufacturers look for the ways to save mass in vehicle structures, the amount of advanced high-strength steels used is increasing. Typically, in order to produce parts with these steels, which have tensile strengths in excess of 780 MPa, they are hot stamped, meaning that the metal blanks are heated up to improve their ductility, then put in the press. Otherwise, something would break. Which would be a serious problem.

Mazda Motor Corp. has long done things that other manufacturers just don’t seem to have the capability of doing.

Like cold stamping 1,310 MPa steel to produce parts for the 2019 Mazda3.*

The company worked with Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corporation as well as JFE Steel Corporation to develop the process.

According to Mazda research steel above 1,180 MPa hasn’t been cold stamped prior to this new development.

The parts being produced by Mazda are the front pillar inner, roof rail inner, hinge pillar reinforcement, roof rail reinforcement, No. 2 crossmember, and side sill inner.

Compared with the existing model, the 1,310 MPa steel components for the new one result in a 3 kg savings.

Mazda intends to use this process for new vehicles as they are developed and produced.

*Or another example is that it developed a variation of a homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) gasoline engine, one that cleverly doesn’t rely solely on compression for ignition but actually uses a spark plug when necessary. The Skyactiv-X engine, as it is known, will be available in the 2019 Mazda3 later in the launch.