The specific goal of this project was to develop and evaluate the effect of magnetic processing as a viable and new technology to manufacture side?rails for heavy trucks
and to demonstrate the applicability of this technology for an industrial truck/automotive process. The targeted performance enhancements for this project were to increase the hardness or strength of two families of alloys (comparable carbon contents but one alloy system incorporating hardenability improving additions of titanium and boron) by 15 to 20%. Thermomagnetic processing has been shown to make significant and unprecedented, simultaneous improvements in yield strength and ultimate tensile strength with no loss of ductility for the truck rail application investigated in this project. Improvements in the ultimate tensile strength and yield strength in the range 20 to 30% have been measured even for the lower hardenability alloy samples that only received a very low magnetic field tempering treatment at a tempering temperature that was 67% lower than the current non-magnetic field enhanced commercial process and for a brief tempering time of 20% of the time required in their current process at the higher temperature. These significant developments, that require further demonstration and investigation on current commercial and other alloy systems, promise the evolution of a much more energy efficient and lower-carbon footprint process to be used in the future to produce stronger, tougher, and lighter weight truck rails. The property increases in the truck rails themselves will enable lighter weight truck side-rails to be produced which will reduce the overall weight of heavy duty trucks which will reduce fuel consumption and be an enabler of the goals of the DOE EERE SuperTruck Program where fuel consumption reductions of 50% are targeted for the future generation of trucks.