On May 11, POSCO held an opening ceremony to celebrate the completion of its Steel Forming Laboratory at the POSCO Global R&D Center in Songdo, Korea. More than 80 people joined the event, including the employees of customers like GM Korea, Renault-Samsung Motors and Ssangyong Motor Company, and officials of the construction company.
In-hwan Oh, President of POSCO, said, “We implemented a customer-oriented core research infrastructure to help us evaluate products in a production environment similar to that of customers. By doing this, we aim to develop leading technologies and provide preemptive and proactive solutions to customers.”
The Steel Forming Laboratory will be used exclusively to evaluate the products ordered by POSCO customers by looking at properties such as formability, weldability, coating weight, corrosion resistance, and fatigue life. These evaluations will also be used to provide basic customer support such as quality certification. The new Steel Forming Laboratory will primarily be used for more differentiated tasks such as providing application technology solutions involving steel products.
The Steel Forming Laboratory houses various equipment, including roll forming machines and presses, which are used to evaluate the formability of steel products such as POSCO GIGA STEEL and develop new forming technologies. POSCO is the first steelmaker in Korea to use the 2,000-ton hydraulic press in order to evaluate the formability of large components such as the side outers of automobiles. In addition, other equipment such as the high-speed crash test machine, full-scale fatigue test machine, and wheel durability test machine can evaluate the impact and durability of the molded parts of automobiles. They also provide customized analysis results using 3D scanners.
POSCO’s new Steel Forming Laboratory has various facilities for the evaluation and advancement of large components for customers. Above, a POSCO employee can be seen operating the 2000-ton hydraulic press, the first to be purchased by a domestic steelmaker.
POSCO will use these machines to implement its “POSCO One-Stop Development” system, making it possible to perform every step from developing application technologies for steel products to production verification testing without the involvement of customers, a move towards further reinforcing its Solution Marketing services.
Customers may find it difficult to adopt newly developed steel grades right away, but with POSCO evaluating formability (one of the mandatory criteria for selecting steel products) on behalf of its customers, the burden of selecting new steel grades will be reduced.
POSCO will continue to pursue shared growth by conducting joint research with not only large OEM companies, but also small and medium-sized parts companies that find it relatively more difficult to operate various testing machines.
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