OREANDA-NEWS. December 29, 2011. Recently it is learnt from the production, sales and R&D team for battery steel of Baosteel Ltd.: since Baosteel's battery steel was put into the market in 2004, the accumulative production and sales has been up to 115,000t, occupying a 33.8% market share in domestic market. Now the stable supply to the high end customers such as Sichuan Changhong and Shanghai Jinyang has been secured, and breakthrough has been achieved in the battery testing of key benchmark customer Nanfu Battery, some performance indicators have reached the level of imported battery steel of the same type.

Battery steel is a kind of hi-tech, high value added precision cold-rolled steel strip of high quality requirements. Due to its rigorous requirements for material performance, dimensional accuracy and surface quality, it is reputed as the premium product among cold-rolled products. The domestic market of steel for battery shell is monopolized by a few foreign steel enterprises for a long time. To break up the monopoly, Baosteel set up battery steel R&D team, which discarded the technological process of foreign products and developed a brandnew steel grade and through-going process technology independently. Through sustained optimization of production process, quality improvement and after-sales technical service, the batch production capacity of steel for battery shell has been formed. The products involve chargeable battery and primary alkali battery, etc. The production and sales both demonstrate a trend of steady growth. The product has obtained the certificate of Shanghai Hi-tech Achievement Conversion project and has become one of the new competitive steel grades of Baosteel.

The rapid development of battery industry in recent two years imposes higher requirements on the material for battery production. How to provide the customers with the high speed and thinned pre Ni plating steel for battery of high appearance quality has become the bottleneck for Baosteel's products to enter the market. After investigation and analysis, battery steel production, sales R&D team made correct positioning and put forward "3-year action plan". This year, the battery steel production, sales R&D team overcame the difficulties such as high purity steel-making and high temperature annealing, etc. successively, improved the product stability and successfully developed the 0.25mm continuously annealed IF type battery steel. In the meantime, it planned and set up "Battery steel technical cooperation platform" with the customers to speed up the product development and research on application technologies, and propel the seamless link of upstream and downstream industrial chains.