Meet Matthijs Toose, R&D Scientific Fellow at Tata Steel Nederland. Specialising in premium outer panel surfaces like Serica FLO. In this interview he addresses future trends, reducing CO2 emissions, and evolving customer needs.
What are you doing in the field of Outer Panels?
I am working in our Research and Development (R&D) department within Tata Steel Nederland. My job is to develop steel with a special surface that is optimised for a good paint appearance. Premium paint appearance can be a subjective field as we deal with aesthetics, and it took us a while to develop a measurement for this. We are now able to objectively quantify good paint appearance, and that resulted in Serica FLO, our premium surface finish for the automotive industry. I feel privileged to have contributed to this development.
We are continuously developing improved versions of Serica FLO, in which we tune the steel surface to the specific paint system and processes at our customers. There are limits to mimic on a test bench what really happens within our factory. Therefore, we perform large factory trails with many testing variations. My R&D team and I oversee the entire steel production route from casting to cold rolling, annealing and zinc application to understand if everything works out.
What do you think our customers need?
We need to team up with our customers to reduce their CO2 footprint while maintaining the high quality and performance of the cars . Surely, EV’s take away CO2 emissions during the use phase of the car. However the production phase of an electric vehicle still counts for a significant amount of CO2 emissions. We can contribute to our customer's footprint reduction by developing CO2 neutral steel, and Tata Steel Nederland makes huge efforts in this area.
We see that paint work is one of the biggest contributors to CO2 emission within the car production plant. The paint process is very complicated and CO2 intensive. Once the paint has been applied, you need to cure it in large furnace at about 180 degrees.
Our customers are thinking about reducing the curing furnace temperatures or using other paint systems, such as UV curing ones, to reduce CO2 emissions. That is why we need to re-think the steels we offer them for premium paint appearance, because currently, we use bake-hardening steels for this purpose. These benefit from the high temperature during paint curing with an increase in strength. And this additional strength is beneficial for instance to make doors more dent-resistant. Therefore, we are currently evaluating what could be a suitable alternative for the bake-hardening steels that also offers the required strength without compromising the premium paint appearance our customers need.
What are trends for the future that customers will find important in 10 years’ time?
First of all, I personally think in 10 years from now, people still want to own a car. Even if trends like car sharing increase, it will take more time to change the status symbol of owning a car and the convenience of having one in front of the own house. In the future, we will see even more electronics within the car supporting the driver with self-correcting features or even for the trend towards autonomous driving.
All these driver assistance functions require a well-functioning environment detection. That means, my own car needs to be visible to others around me. This is done with radar sensors, for example. If my car had radar-absorbing paintwork, it would be disadvantageous.
What are we really good at as Tata Steel Nederland?
I think we are honest and very open with our customers and have a great flexibility. We always align our thinking with our customers' needs and preferences. That means, we look beyond the specifications they ask for but rather think ahead about performance in the production processes so that we can discuss potential problems beforehand.
In R&D we take pride in our knowledge of paint appearance, and we want our customers to benefit from this. When I speak to our customers, I discuss with them from my physics point of view what happens within their processes in their paint shop. And often, this different point of view kickstarts further improvements. I really like this way of working as it strengthens customer relationships and this can even result in real partnerships.
Organisation
Theme
For further information