OREANDA-NEWS. February 14, 2011. Before the Spring Festival, good news come from Baosteel Co., Ltd. Steel Tube, Pipe and Bar Business Unit: on Jan.28, Baosteel successfully produced B96LX extremely high strength steel cord wire rod. According to the inspection, the product performance has reached all the design requirements, which symbolizes that Baosteel's capability to manufacture steel cord has reached the international advanced level, and has covered all the series of steel cord wire rod products, reported the press-centre of Baosteel.

As the steel cord improves each grade, the automobile tire can reduce weight by 10%. Therefore, they are the requirements put forward by lightweight development of automobile industry for steel cord to improve strength, reduce weight and extend service life. But the manufacture of steel cord becomes difficult substantially. In particular, the higher carbon content the steel grade has, the more difficult to control segregation.

In recent years, Baosteel Co., Ltd. Steel Tube, Pipe and Bar Business Unit actively implements differentiation strategy, keeps close track of the international developing trend of steel cord, and carries out proactive R&D and production to keep pace with the international peers. It has successively developed and produced in batches the steel cord products such as B86LX, B92LX, etc., which satisfies the development demand of domestic automobile industry.

Extremely high strength B96LX is the highest grade in steel cords now. At present, only several Japanese enterprises are in the stage of trial production in the world. The successful production of B96LX marks that Baosteel has become one of the very few enterprises in the world that can manufacture this product, which plays a leading role for domestic steel cord to follow the route of high strength.