The demand in the automotive industry to reduce the fuel consumption is becoming more and more important. The reduction of the weight in auto bodies can help to save fuel. Particularly the reduction of the sheet metal thickness which goes along with higher strength of the sheet metal can provide a significant contribution to save weight in auto bodies. Isotropic high-strength steels, so-called I-Steels (e.g. St250i) have been developed. This high-strength I-Steel sheets shows a direction-independent ("isotropic") material behavior at good ductility. With these I-Steels, inner as well as outer panels can be produced. In this paper, the isotropic characteristics of high-strength I-Steel materials are compared to DC04 which is a AK-DDQ quality steel with nearly the same strain-hardening coefficient (n-value) and the same microsurface structure.
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